


strange things to desperate men

by jeannedarc



Category: SuperM (Korea Band)
Genre: (easy on the fantasy), (i will tag said explicit sexual content when it is Time), (it's actually Rivals To Lovers but go off ao3), (slaps roof of doc) this baby can fit all the super m members inside it, Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Barebacking, Blasphemy, Character Death, Drinking, Enemies to Lovers, Forbidden Love, Historical Fantasy, M/M, Pining, Teacher-Student Relationship, UPDATED TAGS INCLUDE:, explicit sexual content to come, fuckboy prince jongin, horny fighting, lowkey fuckboy assassin taemin, soft lucas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:54:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 52,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24116095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: If it's between saving his own life teaching a brat of a prince his way around a sword, or rotting his head off in a dungeon beneath said prince's castle, Taemin will take the former.
Relationships: Kim Jongin | Kai/Lee Taemin, side kai/mark - Relationship, side taemin/ten
Comments: 84
Kudos: 146





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO!  
> please love this baby it is my baby i have been working on her forever and i am so proud of how she's shaped up and become her very own behemoth  
> please note: there are side ships tagged for a reason. some of them are explicitly depicted while others are mentioned in passing. please be mindful of this and if you don't have anything nice to say about that i don't really, like, care ♥  
> my collaborator kayla has done a bunch of art for this au!! i am so blessed. it was her art that got me started. [her twitter](http://twitter.com/taestykai) has some pieces up on it right now. they are ABSOLUTELY breathtaking. please give her love too!! it's what she deserves!!!
> 
> thank you the most to kayla, who asked me for this idea on a whim not knowing what sort of monster it'd grow into -- you have been the most fun person to collaborate with and you'll never know Precisely how much that means to me  
> thank you the most to elle, my patient editor and loml, who sat through this and held my hand even when i was too delicate to take very valid criticism, i hope you don't hate me after this is over. we made it baby. we saw it through  
> thanks to the word nerd discord, who have been very supportive even when my hyperfixation was probably irritating. every sprint brought me closer to an ending with which i could be happy, and i appreciate all of you for helping me reach that ♥  
> thanks to everyone who's been a part of my creative process in doing this, who's sat through me bitching about it until i thought i'd turn blue in the face, who's let me grieve killing my darlings and helped me clean up afterward -- each of you are invaluable and i love you very much!!!

Perhaps Taemin had known all along that this would be his fate: that he would be led to the gallows, head hung low, stripped of cowl and weapons, and exposed to the world for the bastard he truly is and always has been. _Spineless_ , they shout intermittently, _betrayer, traitor, dirt, filth_. He pricks his ears to the insults, lavishing in them despite the earth and loam and mildew caked to his every bare surface, every piece of his spirit that he had foolishly exposed to the crown prince.

On the way he catches no glimpse of Jongin, neither among the crowd shouting ugly epithets nor high upon his throne as a prince so lovely and so wanting should be. Taemin isn't surprised. After all, he had known this, too, that Jongin would not be the one suffering for their tryst. It had been stupid of him to hope that, perhaps, he had not been the only one who cared.

The crowds have gathered, a public tired, hungry for blood, and a court to match as they smile behind their hands, their printed fans, their shirtsleeves and gilded collars. It serves him right, that they should want to see his demise. He had been no friend of theirs, after all, exposing their petty gossips, forcing the prince and his father to make choices that they would have otherwise left dormant.

Here, with his hands roped behind his back, Taemin is filled with something like regret. Its distant cousin, he supposes, though with very little confidence. He regrets those parts, the ones in which he had been spiteful. He regrets taking on his role as trainer to a warrior king in the making. He regrets ever having accepted a mission to murder the king of this land.

The one thing he does not regret as he makes his slow, guided path toward the headsman who'll be his end -- the one unregrettable thing is loving Jongin with everything that he is, and everything that he will be for the remaining few moments of his life.

Still, as the headsman looms before him, there is no sight of the prince to whom he’d incidentally sworn fealty. He hopes, for both their sakes, that Jongin does not make himself known at this scene. It would be best that their relationship not end on the memory of his skull resting, bloodied, in a basket.

Morbidly, Taemin thinks of what his reaction might be should their situations be reversed and, for once, he does not find that he likes it any better.

///

In truth: this story begins in the woods, on the border of a small but affluent nation. It centers on a man sitting at a pathetic excuse for a fire as he tries to cook himself a meal -- his first in two or so days, and his stomach rumbles with excitement at the prospect of finally, _finally_ being full.

A trail of bodies, namely aristocrats with the occasional too-wealthy merchant for flavour, marks his path, though not in the literal sense. He had taken jobs to get to this one, to fund his expedition for the one big payoff that means he will never have to work again. As he turns the dead rabbit on his hand-fashioned spit, he thinks of the meal to end all meals, the one he’ll have upon finally winning himself security -- of spiced mead and baked apples with honey and lamb with mint sprigs peppered atop it as it drips with juice.

His mouth waters. He is clearly more hungry than he’d thought at the outset. 

With his free hand, Taemin toys with his hidden knives, tucked into his waistband underneath his cloak, with one hand, evenly continues turning the spit with the other. Though he should know the dangers of camping this close to his mark, he had been too hungry, too cold, too _tired_ to continue on without it, and there is no assassin who can get the job done if he dies of exposure en route.

Something in the woods rustles, unnatural, a twig snapping underfoot, and he rises in a flash, the prospect of his meal abandoned in favour of drawing one of those daggers of which he's so fond. He proffers it in the direction from which he'd heard the sound coming, blood singing, body tensing, he coiled and ready to strike should the need arise.

There is a moment in which he hesitates, but his ears prick one direction; he takes a knife, throws it that way, is satisfied to hear the thunk, the rustle of underbrush as his target sogs to the ground. There is nothing that gets him going quite so cleanly as a kill well-executed. He raises his second knife to them, an enormous thing, longer than his forearm and so sharp it could cut through them and feel like a hair brushing their foreheads.

His predators emerge from the bush, astonishment in their eyes as they look the assassin up and down.

It turns out there had been three assailants upon his camp, two now he’s killed one and neither of whom he's particularly happy to see. Judging by the ashen fear in their faces, the grim set of their mouths, they share the same sentiments. One departs the scene immediately, goes to his fallen friend, checking for mortality and, finding it, leaves him behind. He clutches at his chest, obviously fighting some sort of grief. 

Now regathered, the two remaining flank him with weapons drawn, dressed in their military finery, gold and grey and cream. Their horses trail behind them on lush-looking reins, the leather still creaking beneath their leader’s tight-gripping hands. He envies them, but only in the sense that a cat might envy a bird's freedom -- they do what he does, but not in the shadows, killing for their king while he does his work for profit, hidden by an entire world that does not want to see him.

Before them, Taemin does not tremble, and in fact calls to them with a smirk at his full, bloodless mouth: "State your business." He has not lowered his knife, a fact which draws their eyes quicker than his physical presence ever could; the blade gleams in the low light of the fire.

Hysterical that he thinks he has some high tack to take with these militia men, who make more in a day than he sometimes makes in a month. He could just laugh himself to death. 

"State yours," replies the foremost of the two of them, the one who had held Taemin captive by proximity rather than checking on the fellow soldier. He looks brave, this one. "Or I'll be taking you back to His Majesty in chains. These are Shaeran lands, after all, and you don't seem to hold any position here.” 

The friend cocks his head, the anguish still clear in his eyes. He might well be younger than his compatriot, certainly less seasoned, if the loss of one guard is enough to knock him on his ass. “His Majesty is always delighted to take in traitors and those who cross the forest without permission," he says, stilted, a touch of an accent laced through his words.

And really, the threat _should_ be enough for Taemin to learn to stop talking, but then, prudence has never been one of his favourite words. "His Majesty," he shoots back, mockery in his tone, and the two soldiers clutch their chests. Taemin knows full well they treat their royalty in this kingdom like gods, descended directly from the sky or the earth or whatever deity they choose to worship these days, and that he's struck a nerve. "I should be so lucky as to be presented to him, if you'd be so kind to do it. A mere mortal like me, presented bound and pretty to someone so revered? You'd be doing me a favour."

The message in his pocket is burning a hole, threatens to singe him through. It is foolish of him to challenge these men, but it would make his life so much easier could he be delivered to the king in person, rather than having to starve his way across so many forest floors before making it to his mark.

"I'll be taking you, then, should you choose not to drop your weapon," says the second of the guardsmen, his chin lifted high and proud despite his inner turmoil. Taemin wants nothing more to spit at his feet. He has no reverence for this false god, trained in the ways of the woods and adherent to the spirits what raised him. "I'd suggest you do it. 'Tis a long way back to the place where His Majesty resides, and we have the authority to take you back by force, if we need to do so."

Taemin does not move an inch, and is already plotting how best to get past these fools, should they not make good on their promise. They don't have to, much to his grave misfortune. An arrow comes sailing out from between the trees, catches him in the hem of his cowled cloak and pins him to the ground. Another, just as quickly, spears through the garment on the other side, and though he could just slip out of it, unwind it from around his throat and charge the two guards to find his way to the third, an idea comes to mind.

"I surrender," he says, and the words taste of bilious humour, of rank he's long since earned. He stoops and puts his beloved knife in the soft earth beneath his feet. Though he is loath to leave it behind, the sabre at his side -- hidden beneath lushly lined fabric -- is enough to help him, should he find himself in a sticky situation.

There is silence, save the gentle crackling of meat not but a few feet from where Taemin stands pinned to the ground. Their unseen fourth -- third, now, Taemin corrects, never too good at basic mathematics as he is with a knife, with talking so much he gets himself in trouble -- approaches, a longbow tucked into his side. "Nice to meet you, Viper," he says with a wicked grin, and he's sharp, so sharp, something honed and beautiful that Taemin could see himself falling into bed with, were the circumstances just a bit different. "We've been asked to find your like."

He holds Taemin’s knife, thrown recklessly in a fit of need to survive, aloft between his thin, nimble fingers. It is coated in a stranger’s blood, and Taemin swears he could see a sliver of grey matter upon the hilt. Disgusting. He grimaces. He’d just cleaned that belovèd baby of his.

Taemin meets this accusation, laid at his feet without so much as the slightest hint of ceremony, with indignant silence. He thinks that he could never be so much a fool as to fall into a trap. But then, it wouldn't be the first time someone's court intrigue had gotten one of his fellows into something like this, unable to be disentangled and disreputable besides. Had he known it would come to this end, he'd still be fighting, last breath spent trying not to end up in someone else’s dungeons. He shudders at the thought of rotting to death while splayed out on the cobblestones that dripped, dank, mildewing with fellow prisoners long forgotten. 

Ignoring the thought even as it plagues him, he sighs, and shakes his head, and offers a smile. "I'm already yours," he points out, gesturing to the shafts keeping him in place where they protrude from the soil beneath his boots. "I'm not putting up a fight."

"Isn't that charming of you," says the archer, a brow raised and the barest hint of a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth. "Fine. Strip him of his belongings. He'll be coming back with us." There is an air of danger about this man, when he too stoops in the dirt to which Taemin is tethered, plucks up the second blade abandoned this night. He sheaths both blades in his belt, the fine-honed edges exposed momentarily and glinting in the fire still crackling to Taemin’s one side.

“Strip me?” And now it’s Taemin who’s the one grinning like a court jester, all lunacy and cunning piled into one person. He finally unbuckles the cloak from around his throat, casting it aside, prepared to abandon it to its presumable tatters. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Though he’s reluctant to admit it, employing his charm has always been his second favourite part of the job. Right after fighting, of course.

///

The journey takes three days, all told, the horses being spoiled and slow and the guards needing breaks more often than a dedicated man might. The kingdom in which he’s found himself isn’t one that boasts large borders, but rather large coffers, of which Taemin’s all too aware. The only thing that pleases him more than getting a job done is getting paid handsomely for it. He wonders whether or not the contact that had hired him was in the king’s pocket, whether or not it’d be his mark’s own money with which he’d have been paid. The irony, after all, would be delicious.

He entertains himself, as he is wont to do, namely going out of his way to annoy the everloving shit out of the guards meant to carry him back to his future prison. On the first day he whines about his aching feet with every step until someone is kind enough to heft him on horseback -- the big one who had kept trained on him upon Taemin’s capture. His hands are rough, and he lifts with the strength of a farm boy, used to hefting sacks of grain over his shoulder rather than people with working limbs. 

Once he’s on the horse, Taemin whines about how the horse’s every movement jostles his balls in a way he finds unkind. The younger one doesn’t like the colourful names Taemin assigns to his genitalia, and the discomfort on his face makes the creativity worth it. A shame, though -- he’d worked hard on ‘meat clackers’.

It’s worth it, though, to see at least one of them roll their eyes about the drama of it all. 

On the second day he manages to convince them to untie his hands, which is good in a sense -- the chafe, while something he might find enjoyable in a lover, or an enemy, or both, has been threatening to inflict true wounds upon his worked-over, rough-hewn skin. “Curse whatever heavenly body deigned you for knot-tying,” he’d spat in one guard’s direction, once he’d finally been freed. “You’re a horrible study and I must teach you the proper way to depose an enemy for transport.”

They don’t like the underlying threat, judging by the way they barely let him out of their sight to take his usual hourly roadside piss.

The archer, he learns by listening, is named Ten, and is one of the top officers in this King’s Royal Guard, not that he seems to have much love for the job. He is always the first to react to Taemin’s jesting, and the first to join in on a bit with him. Interesting, considering the role rarely befits someone as spritely, or as youthful, or as kissed by the blood of the fae as he is.

Late at night, when someone is meant to keep watch over Taemin and make sure no one comes to steal him away in an act of foolhardy vengeance, they end up talking more often than not. Ten takes up time by explaining the law of the land,the various ins and outs of a court Taemin will likely never attend. 

Through these conversations, and through hours of watching a campfire succumb to its timely and beautiful death, it comes to pass that Taemin, despite his dislike of his current situation, rather likes Ten. He promises himself that they should spend more time together, if he manages to keep his head once in the presence of the ever-revered His Majesty.

Ten, it seems, just likes to talk. And that’s fine, Taemin being accustomed to the habit, a bit of a chatty bastard himself. On second watch on the third day Ten takes a seat beside Taemin, uncaring of the dirt, and tips toward him a lacquered flask of what smells to be some decidedly fine liquor. “Drink,” he says, more a question than command despite his position of power. “You look like you need it. Riding behind the demon child doesn’t seem to have done well for you.”

Taemin’s inclined to agree, and shudders to think of the myriad questions the child guard Yangyang, barely old enough to tell his ass from someone else’s elbow, had pressed upon him during their time sharing a mount. It is with that thought in mind that Taemin gratefully dips his head and takes the drink Ten gently pours into his mouth. It tastes of candy from a land to which Taemin has somehow never been. His eyes must ask of its mystery, because Ten rattles off some long name of which Taemin’s never heard, and smiles when he takes back the drink for himself.

“You’ve been a horrible prisoner,” Ten says, still grinning, tipping the mouth of his flask Taemin’s direction, “and I hope that whatever happens to you, it isn’t death. I don’t know that I could stand the thought of someone with your spirit dead because of your job.”

Taemin lifts a shoulder, presses his palm to his bent knee, trying to work out the source of the tension that suddenly fills him. He has never once feared death. “I could say the same of you,” he says, all fondness and soft tones and softer eyes. “But enough about the morbid business, hm? What haven’t you told me about court?”

Ten seems to think this over a long while, head tipping this way and that, a little song hummed under his breath accompanying the movements. “There’s the prince,” he says at last. “His Highness, the Crown Prince Jongin.”

Somehow, Taemin knows this name; he wonders if perhaps it’s from a job he turned down, when he was a little less down on his luck. _Go on,_ he says without saying, a perfect bat of lashes, a jutting bottom lip all he needs to express himself properly. Perhaps that speaks to his and Ten’s sympatico. 

“He’s the king’s only son,” Ten continues, long-suffering in his tone, in the gentle drag of his fingertips through the soft loam of dirt beneath them both. “Spoiled beyond reason, and untouched if you’re to hear the priests tell of it. Divinely chosen, all that bullshit.” And here Ten’s smile turns something wry, unreadable. “Not that that makes it true, of course. Everyone has their secrets, don’t they?”

Taemin wonders what he might give, to learn a prince’s secrets and squirrel them away for his own use. But then, he doesn’t think much of his chances to do so, and abandons the idea with a quickness with which he surprises himself. “What does he matter? If he doesn’t mingle with the courtiers or the courtesans…”

“He’s very important,” Ten points out, almost affronted by the notion that someone so highly elevated wouldn’t be a key player in any game. “Sits at His Majesty’s side for all council sessions, all that lofty business. Oh, don’t look surprised, everyone needs a little grooming to become who they are.”

“You didn’t,” points out Taemin, equally offended. “You simply are.”

Rolling his eyes, Ten ignores the comment, pushes on the lecture he’s trying to give. “He’ll be king very soon, you know. Our current divine protector of the realm, or whatever he’s wiping himself on these days, isn’t in the best of health.” He snorts out a laugh and, despite the fire by which they warm their hands and feet on this moonless night, it comes out something condensed and thick and foggy. “You should see him. If I hadn’t been charged with bringing you in I’d probably have let you do whatever you came to do. It wouldn’t even be interesting for you, but I’m sure the purse would have been more than enough.”

For the record, Taemin knows better than to entertain the enemy with the specifics of his job, but his cheeks are warm with drink, and he leans over into Ten’s shoulder, begging quietly another sip of candy drink. “Please,” he says, a rarity for him, a man without manners both by trade and by nature. “You’re very good at sharing.”

And Ten shakes with the laughter that wracks him at the notion. His laughter is charming. In some other life, Taemin could see them falling in.

But the thing about good fortune, he has learned over the years, is this: he so rarely comes upon it. It might just be in poor taste to squander it in favour of a night or two of bliss followed by far too many subsequent nights of arguing or, worse yet, running.

When he falls asleep at last, lulled by the dimly glowing embers of the fire as it dies at last, he wonders whether or not he imagines the caress of Ten’s dirt-caked fingertips in his filthy hair, but then supposes it doesn’t matter so much as he would like to think it does.

In the morning, he wakes with the taste of golden honey on his tongue, spectral but there all the same, and realises too late that he had spent his restful hours dreaming of a prince he’d never seen. It wouldn’t be the first time, though he must admit to the tent in his breeches that it might be the most pathetic.

The last day of their journey isn’t a true one, and they reach their destination before the sun hangs its highest in a clear-and-cloudy sky. The castle, looming before them, monstrous in the way it seems to keep so much more in than it does out, has Taemin’s heart thudding in his throat. He would be remiss not to note the number of times that he nearly chokes on his own spit in his haste to stop looking at it. His belly fills with the fear of seeing its high walls and elegantly-constructed turret towers, and he thinks it might snatch some part of his soul from beneath the safety of his ribcage.

Ten slows his mount with a tug on the reins, a low bellow that causes his companions in arms to do the same. His horse sidles up beside Taemin’s, shared again with the child guard, who does not unsettle him near as much as he had the day before. Glancing around, Ten murmurs to him, “I’m going to try something, if that’s all right with you.”

He knows better than to ask questions of those offering favour, but can’t help the little quirk of a frown that plays across his mouth. 

Instead of voicing the concern that bubbles up in his gut, he bobs along with the ride, groaning quietly. He’s never ached quite this much, he realises as they slow, and the forest paths give way to something more solid. Perhaps, should he live, he might train more on horses than he has these past few years, Taemin deciding it would do him well in the long run of things.

The pebbled path eventually gives way to something bricked over, lined with guards in similarly-coloured uniforms to the ones in which his current coterie are dressed, albeit with far more pomp. They raise their sabres as the Guard Captain, his underlings, and his captured prisoner make their way across a moat that Taemin imagines to be full of flesh-eating reptiles of one variety or another. He wonders whether their teeth drip with venom, if the grey, sallow crowned head feeds his enemies to them, what the pain might be like should as much be the case.

A shiver prickles its way down his nape, and he shrugs his repaired cloak higher over his shoulders, pulling his cowl close to fight the bite of the cold that has no explanation.

They work in tandem, the child guard Yangyang and his companion -- a slightly older teen by the name of Yukhei -- to unseat Taemin, sore and overstretched from all the riding he’d talked himself into. It's an effort, and he nearly hits the bricks beneath him at how unformed his legs feel supporting him, turned to jelly by the strain of the ride. He picks himself back up from the ground, lets himself be tied up at the wrists again, the binds before him and the rope cutting into barely-healed sore spots. "It's okay," he jokes, when any of them cast concerned glances his way; though they seem loath to confess as much, they must have grown fond of him. "I'll be fine. I do worse than this nightly where I'm from."

Ten, at the very least, snorts with something like derision.

The maw of the castle opens up and threatens to swallow them whole, and they're allowed in after a long, standing wait for the drawbridge to drop. Ten takes Taemin sharply by the elbow, shifting his bow up his opposite shoulder. "Sorry," he says, not a hint of apology as he drags Taemin across the cobbles. "I'm meant to make this look convincing."

"Not too convincing," Taemin winces, in spite of the coquette that creeps into his voice, "or else I'll embarrass myself in front of the _God_."

"No more of that, assassin scum," and Ten's voice raises, theatrics. Taemin's half a mind to ask what troupe he'd come from before this -- he is, after all, quite the talented actor.

It's a veritable maze between the entrance and the throne room. They cross over their own steps no less than a half-dozen times. Taemin marks the path they make by flicking broken fingernails into cracks between bricks. Only when he sees his pinky nail sticking out from a particular crevasse does he turn to Ten, frowning, and asks, "Are you trying to make sure I can't escape?"

Ten shrugs, turns a corner. "Not up to me how we do things. Be quiet, I can't have them knowing I'm friendly with an enemy of the state."

The throne room opens up before them almost too suddenly. Taemin is stricken with vertigo when the chasm appears, lined with courtiers, gilded fans, fluttering eyelashes and hot and heavy breaths. It seems they've been waiting for him. Good. He likes the idea of a captive audience. He lifts his chin, his gaze comprised entirely of pride, his eyes sparkling something wicked.

They gasp, unaccustomed to a prisoner lacking in shame. Even better.

At the tail end of the approach, Ten and Yukhei each gripping at one of Taemin's elbows, sits the king, on his gilded throne, all condescension in his eyes even where his body appears to fail. He truly is turning something awful -- gelatinous in nature, stomach sagging past the hem of his tunic. Whatever is melting him won't take much longer to take him out. A year, perhaps. The king leans forward in his too-important chair, tucks his tented fingertips beneath his chin, uses it to support the sagging weight of his skin.

"Who," he asks, and his voice is sharp as the knives his soldiers had taken from Taemin just a few days prior, "are you, that you think you can kill me?"

Taemin doesn't notice that he's being addressed at first, too taken with the young gentleman sitting twice as beautiful as Taemin had imagined in his dreams. He does not get the time to admire, time which he knows this spoiled child demand. He knows it’s a snap judgment, based on the intense boredom in his eyes, the way in which he rests his temple upon his index finger and watches both everything and nothing at once. He knows, too, that he is staring, his mouth slightly ajar. At least he's got plenty of time to try and talk himself out of this. At least, so he hopes.

He turns his attention to the king, all bright even as he fills with faux remorse, his genuflection drawing the eyes of the crowd. Good. Better to put on a show than to die quietly. "I'm the best at what I do," he says without lifting his head. The courtiers surrounding him gasp, titter, the seemingly endless expanse of the throne room filling its gaping belly with scandalised laughter. "The only reason I got caught, Your Majesty, is because I got hungry."

The king seems to fix his weary eyes on Ten, first, rather than Taemin; he can see the looks he's drawing even through the curtain of his too-long hair. "What say you?" he asks his guard, and Ten shifts, uncomfortable.

"I believe he's correct in his presumption," he says, with a bell-clear honesty that threatens to bring Taemin to tears. Never has he been _told_ he's right in such a dire situation as this. "He took out the third of the party as easily as breathing, and there’s a grave at the southern border that will prove it, should His Majesty deign to look. And I believe that, for your safety, as well as the kingdom's, he should be put to better use than death."

Taemin cannot believe his ears, colours to the tips of them as he listens on, feeling the interloper in some very private matters. "As you know," Ten continues, crossing the brief space between their traveling party and the foot of the throne, "our Prince -- begging your pardon, Your Highness--" and he tips his head toward Jongin, a petty imitation of courtesy which draws a sneer from the young monarch in question, "our Prince has not been doing well at his lessons."

"That isn't true," and Gods, but hearing the Prince's voice for the first time -- he is nothing like the music the tales tell Princes to be, though Taemin doesn't say so aloud. He is something earthy and low and there's a touch of growl to his tone that turns him into some demon the likes of which Taemin could have only imagined, previously, in his wettest and wildest dreams. "The truth is that no one will take me _seriously_ enough to fight me."

The King clears his throat, imploring his son to quiet, which he does, settling back into his seat and pouting for all the world to see. Taemin rolls his eyes -- does this child have no shame? He is clearly of an age that he should be taught the ins and outs of his job, and yet here he is, wide-eyed and on the verge of crocodile tears.

For a moment, despite the Prince’s beauty, Taemin loathes the cowardice lying beneath this boy ruler’s surface.

"I propose," continues Ten, as if he's not been interrupted, "that this assassin, who has failed at his mission, find a better purpose here. I think he would do well at training with the prince." His chin raises an inch, overflowing with a confidence to which Taemin wishes he felt entitled. He wants to object, but knows what the alternative is all too well, and has escaped death a few too many times to put himself in that position again.

"You must be out of your mind," the King says. His voice is weak, tremulous, his illness threatening to knock him from the expensive seat upon which he perches, a canary whose lungs are black with dust. "You think I would spare the life of someone who intended to end mine?"

"I think you would spare the Prince his life in the future, should you agree to this," Ten quips without a moment's hesitation, bored now, looking down at his nails. The bow on his shoulder rattles quietly. "And I think our kingdom would be better served for this. The Prince must learn to command armies, and he cannot make informed decisions if he doesn’t know what to do in a fight. But then, you didn't make me head of your royal archers for my opinions, did you?" And Ten, all drama, sweeps from the courtroom, a smile on his lips with which he graces Taemin upon passing.

The courtiers have fallen eerily silent. It must have some implications that Taemin, new to court, does not understand. He makes a note to ask Ten, should he be permitted.

Danger prickles at Taemin's nape when he hears the prince speak up again, all impetuousness drained from his tone. "What is it that _you_ want to do, assassin?" he asks of Taemin, leaning forward in his chair, interest in his eyes for the first time. "Rise. Speak with me. We _are_ to be equals, aren't we?"

Everyone rumbles their dissent, but Taemin does as he is bid, approaching the Prince's throne with an inspired temerity. "I think," he says, "that you will hate to train with me, but that you will learn much, and that is all I can ask for from a student." He does not mention that he's never taught before, only been taught. The only way to get a job is to have it in oneself to believe one can do it. Or, at least, so he's been told.

He wishes he'd had some sort of warning, that he was going to interview for a position, but that is neither here nor there.

The Prince tugs languidly at the hem of his cream-coloured tunic. "If that is what you think," he murmurs, the slowest hint of a smirk passing over his face, "then we shall find out." Here he glances at his father. "Should you not meet my personal expectation, at the very least, I can take your head at any time."

Taemin swallows thickly, tongue sandy against the ridges of his palate. "You can," he concedes, knowing that he is bound to this castle until the probable unnatural end of his life.

///

Ten takes him out drinking, to a local spot heavily populated by Ten’s fellow soldiers. "A celebration," he says, "for a man smart enough to know when not to talk." He raises his cup, claps Taemin on the back, leans his temple on his shoulder. "I didn't think you had it in you...you never shut up on the way here."

Taemin drinks, too, drawing his new cloak around him. His mouth fills with some strange flavour of spiced berry, and he drinks again, flags down a serving girl, orders another pair in rapid succession. The one good thing about working under the richest king on the continent: the benefits are limitless. They're drinking up His Majesty’s coin tonight. "What's the prince really like?" he asks. He can barely hear himself over the roar of a drinking competition of some kind, a couple tables over. The barbarian pounding of meaty fists upon tables and cheers for either potential victor makes his head ring.

"Oh, you know," and here Ten makes some sort of wickedly dismissive hand gesture, "a baby in adult's clothing. Never been out from under his father's wing. No one can fight him because no one can touch him. You saw how he was when he met you, throwing a tantrum about how his lessons don't go as planned because everyone would rather lose their heads willingly than leave a bruise on the child. Also,” and here the low lamplight gleams something awful in Ten’s eyes, “he’s an absolute slut, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

That doesn't sound very interesting, at least to Taemin, who's been fighting all his life, and tries his best not to get lost in a memory in this very moment. Instead he chooses to focus on the flickering in Ten's eyes, spurred on by the dim roar of conversation surrounding them. "Am I going to hit him?" he asks, surreptitious in his desire to knock some sense into every royal brat he's ever come across.

"I hope you are," Ten answers, snorting into his flagon with a pointed roll of his eyes. "Someone has to."

Just then, someone who had managed to sneak up on them taps Ten on the shoulder, a handsome thing with the loveliest eyes, a shy smile, strong eyebrows that suit his wide forehead. Taemin should know better, but a flare of jealousy builds in him, blue in its warmth, as he shuffles a couple marks away, giving Ten room to do whatever it is he feels necessary. Apparently, 'whatever' entails going away with that wicked gleam of his, the one that reminds Taemin that Ten, while human, can be utterly evil from time to time.

Alone in his cups, Taemin wonders whether all this has been worth his life. Indentured servitude is the one thing he'd tried all his life to escape. He’d spent his money like a pauper when he could have been a prince, taking jobs only that were close to the place he'd once considered home because the travel brought up too much potential for danger.

He finishes his flagon. He orders another. The king's coin can't save him right now, but then, it certainly can't hurt.

Worse yet, Taemin reflects on what Ten's opinion of the Prince is. Though his traitor cock had drawn its own conclusions -- he is, after all, a man of flesh and bone, not beholden to such high standards as an impending King, or even one of his advisors, might be -- his head and heart tell him that to think such things might be a danger. Already several members of the court had approached him at various points throughout the day, asking him the usual questions: where was he from (the south), to whom did he pledge his loyalty (himself), would he still take jobs (not even if he was given this castle and all it entailed). They were, and are, too curious by far, and he does not know that he can handle their curiosities any better than he had handled the occasional disinterested inquiry by his traveling companions.

He tugs at the leather of his glove, slips it into his pocket and, to soothe himself, drags his fingertip against the time-worn grooves in the tabletop. It is a poor distraction by comparison to a companion, but then, he’s always felt himself better alone.

It is then that Ten decides to return, a bit disheveled, the fire in his face amplified, turning him into something almost fox-like. Taemin grins. "Have fun?"

"Oh, no, nono, no, that man is _not_ fun," Ten says stoutly, and flags down the barmaid, bless her soul, for two more drinks, his own having been finished by Taemin. "I, however, am _very_ fun."

"I believe that," Taemin responds, dryly at that, giving Ten the once-over. "Your fly's undone. May want to take a look at that, unless you want someone else to get a look at the goods for free."

Squeaking, Ten reaches under the table with both hands, and Taemin throws his head back, roaring with a lion's laughter.


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Is that what they teach you? That nothing bad can happen to you, because you're a god?"
> 
> Jongin doesn't have an answer for that, and in fact shrinks down in his seat on the bench, looking so small that Taemin can't help but fill with regret, with sympathy that he so rarely shows even himself.
> 
> "That really is what they teach you," he says.

The first day of lessons, Taemin has no intention of allowing the crown prince to pick up a weapon. He's just gotten his own back; Gods know what's happened to them in the time they've been apart. He's antsy to get them back into a condition that might very well suit him better should he suddenly come under attack.

The prince, he has decided, can help with that.

When invited into the proper chambers -- a weapons rack pressed against its southmost wall, laden heavy with all manner of barbaric tools of war, the majority of which bring a shocked grin to Taemin's face -- he is met with the prince. By all accounts and standards, he is far more beautiful face-to-face than he is when he's sitting atop some throne it's clear he has no interest in occupying. So caught off-guard by this is Taemin that he nearly drops the lantern he’s holding, only barely managing a scowl that accompanies him when he goes on to hang it in its appropriate place.

"Hello," says the prince, albeit softly, much like a prey animal being circled by its hunter and inevitable killer. "Shouldn't you bow when you enter a room I'm in?"

"I don't know, Your Highness, do you think I should?" Taemin's foreignness adds to his mystery. He knows as much by the whispers that seem to linger round his ears when he's passing strangers in a hallway. However, he finds playing stupid to add even more layers. "Do you want me to treat you like a prince, or like a contender in battle?"

The prince grumbles out some response that Taemin, unused to such impropriety from such a proper figure, pretends not to hear. "What are we doing today?" And he's all enthusiasm, bright and open and vulnerable. Gods, Taemin could just take his perfectly angled face and crush it between his palms. He's never met someone quite this foolish.

"You'll be sharpening my knives," Taemin says stoutly, "while I figure out which practise armour would best suit you." He goes to a dummy dressed in training clothes, gives it the once-over, then uses the opportunity to drag his eyes along the prince’s slumped and pouting figure. “Straighten up, I need to get a good look at you before I make any sort of judgment.”

"You want me to wear _padding_ ," intones the Prince, flat, offended, but doing what he’s told nevertheless, "and _sharpen knives_."

"Not just knives," he singsongs as he goes over to the bust that holds a single padded suit, his fingertip trailing over the quilting stitched into the fabric. "After that I want you to sharpen every blade in this room that's small enough for you to handle without dragging it on the floor. Do you think you can do that for me?"

Here the prince scoffs. "You cannot possibly be serious, assassin," he says, reaching into the gap between them only to topple forward as Taemin darts back. He windmills something fierce before falling to the ground.

Now it's Taemin's turn to roll his eyes. "I need you to learn discipline before I can trust you in a fight," he says, by way of curt explanation. "You and I will come to blows in due time. Don’t you worry about whether or not you’ll get your precious hands on me, Your Highness."

"Don't _call_ me that," Jongin sputters as he picks himself from the floor, brow knitted in concentration. "If you're going to fight me and treat me different than everyone else treats me and all that ridiculous business then I need you to forget I have a title, first and foremost." He dusts himself off, picking individual motes from the pale silk of his tunic, which appears to have undersold what a good figure the prince has.

Taemin kicks himself mentally for this, but presses forward. "Fine. Shall I call you by first name, or shall we keep it formal, at sir?"

Still patting imaginary dirt from his person, Jongin shakes his head. "No, don't call me _sir_ , either. I have a name, _Viper_." He smirks then, like he’s won something, like Taemin’s ears are meant to burn with shame at hearing his professional name spilling from the lips of an almost-target.

Taemin grits his teeth to keep from snapping back. He’s certainly got his work cut out for him, with this one.

"As do I," points out Taemin as he goes to the low workbench in the room and spreads a strop, an assortment of knives (not all of which belong to him), and a small phial of oil. "Taemin. Use it. Sit down, would you?"

Jongin does as he's told, but it's a futile gesture, considering the way he looks at the tools set before him at his workstation. "What do I do with this...?" he asks, looking up at Taemin, who stands over him with arms folded.

"What do you mean-- have you never sharpened your own blade before?" Taemin does his best to keep the incredulity from his voice, but fails by a northern mile. "Don't tell me, you just take them to the smith and he takes care of all the hard work for you?" he spits, and the candle illuminating the station flickers with the force of it. "You won't have a smithy if you're out hunting, or if you're somehow taken from home. Is that what they teach you? That nothing bad can happen to you, because you're a god?"

Jongin doesn't have an answer for that, and in fact shrinks down in his seat on the bench, looking so small that Taemin can't help but fill with regret, with sympathy that he so rarely shows even himself.

"That really is what they teach you," he says, so softly his lips barely move with the sound.

"Yes," mumbles Jongin, colouring down his throat, so brilliant a shade that he catches even in the weak light of the compromised fire. As if in compensation for something he cannot give this conversation, he stares down at the leather before him, the array of knives, not sure where to start.

He is saved when Taemin plucks up his favourite -- the one Ten had returned to him, sullied and ugly. He first polishes the handle on the edge of his cloak, until it gleams pridefully in spite of the low lighting. The oil comes out, and he gently dots it against the leather, rubbing it in with gentle fingertips. _A lover's caress,_ whispers a man long forgotten, the one who had been kind enough to teach Taemin this skill himself. He thanks whatever god had put that man into his life with his eyes closed.

The leather in one hand, the end caught on a nail at the edge of the table by way of a hole Taemin had painstakingly punched into the skin, he glances down into Jongin's face, makes sure he's being watched. Jongin's attention is on Taemin's hands, eyes wide, bottom lip stuck out. He, for once, is at a loss for what to say.

Then Taemin drags the blade against the strop a couple times, reveling in the soft sound of it, the way it seems to call his name with each pass. One side done, he switches to the other, equally smooth passage from this as he does his work. Soon he's showing off, switching from one side to the other with an ease that speaks to the practise he's had over the years.

Jongin sighs quietly, and Taemin refuses to decide whether it's marvel or boredom that gives him the urge to do so. It's in both their best interests, really.

Once it's done, he wipes the blade clean again with his cloak, careful not to poke any holes into the fabric with the newly-sharpened blade. "There," he says, as if he's teaching a child to do basic arithmetic. For all intents and purposes he may as well be. "A job well done. Your turn." He goes to sheath the knife again, but misses his target by just a half-centimetre, and catches himself in the finger.

It doesn't even hurt. He wonders, as he catches sight of his own blood in the relative darkness, what it might be like to draw this along the Prince's throat, just to remedy his own problem and get the fuck out. It's an idle thought, of course, none too sure of how to make it to the grounds proper rather than the castle's less than reputable underbelly, and besides, whatever he's doing is far more pleasurable to Jongin than killing him could ever be.

There's a sparkle in Jongin's eyes that Taemin doesn't notice until it's too late.

Jongin's hand fits around the shape of Taemin's wrist and, without so much as a warning, he draws Taemin's injured fingertip into his mouth. His tongue drags over the wound, and it stings, Taemin worried of infection, but then the softness of his tongue turns tingling in Taemin’s belly, low, warm, simmering. A promise.

How could infection possibly be his focus, when Jongin looks up at him with those unfathomable depths? When he looks so beautiful with his mouth pursed around Taemin's finger? When his lips are a pale imitation of how they’d look wrapped around his--

He suppresses a shudder, but only just, and yanks his hand back with a feigned cry of distress. "What in the name of all the gods are you doing?"

Jongin just cracks a crooked smile, all evil, the demon in him acting up. "That's so amusing," he drawls, confident now he's got the upper hand. "For such a sour little man, I never thought you'd taste so sweet."

Taemin, now, is the one who colours, though he can't say exactly why: whether it's the obvious flirtation, or the embarrassment at making such an amateurish mistake. He swallows thickly, casts down his sheathed blade, and rolls his shoulders, fighting the urge to yell since he knows it will make little difference. "Get to work," he mutters with a roll of his eyes, and he only lingers in the doorway of the chamber when Jongin's low peals of laughter echo against the stone walls.

///

That night, as Taemin retires to his bath before bed, his limbs aching with the mere notion of restraining himself, he glances down at his bandaged finger. The bleeding had stopped, no thanks to Jongin's antics, and he was well on his way to healing thanks to the castle's doctor. He'd kindly helped Taemin by covering his wound with a salve guaranteed to make things better in a matter of days. Not that Taemin couldn't have done it himself.

The steam rises around him, the bath's sweet and floral scent filling his nostrils, and he should be relaxing. But there's no way not to be tense when he thinks of Jongin's lips around his finger.

Not for the first time, Taemin thinks what he might do to have a prince's secrets, only to come to the conclusion that he may as well count himself among them.

Resolving to talk to someone about it, Taemin sinks beneath the water, letting his hair halo around him, and reaches between his legs without a second thought.

///

"What do you mean, he's flirted with you?"

Ten and Taemin stride about the courtyard while Ten's fellow archers work at target practise. Between the frustrated sighs of his cohorts and the threats to knock one another's heads in the next time someone catches an elbow, it's loud enough that they can have a conversation in relative privacy. Taemin, for one, is grateful to have a friend willing to go to such lengths for him.

"I can't say what he did," Taemin begins, a sigh ready on his lips.

"You can't, or you won't?" Ten prods, like some wicked little man who knows Taemin's pride is bruised and just doesn't care. "It's fine. We're friends here."

"I _can't_ ," Taemin insists, rubbing at the nape of his neck with his sweaty palm. "And I wouldn't, anyway. It's improper."

"He says, having caught me dallying at _least_ twice in the time he's been here." Ten does this thing, from time to time, where he acts as if they're closer than they are, than Taemin might like for them to be, were they given a choice. It's a comfort. Reminiscent of a family Taemin no longer has. "Fine, if you'd rather be a prude about it, then what do you mean?"

"I mean that he goes out of his way to infuriate me just to see my reaction," Taemin explains with a shrug. Behind his head a stray arrow whizzes past; he can feel it breathe its mortal breath against his skin, and shivers. "Watch out!" he calls to the trainee in question, who bows his head in apology as he trots on by to pluck up his loosed reed like the imbecile Taemin immediately takes him for. "He takes joy in my pain. Is that normal?"

"Oh, yes," and here Ten smirks, stepping behind one of his trainees to correct his elbow, a tender touch that doesn't actually seem all too necessary. His people are _tired_ , sagging under the weight of the expectations put on them; Taemin can't blame them for making a mistake. When Ten is back at his side, he quips with a certain sadistic amount of glee: "The Prince loves it when everyone else suffers. What he doesn't understand is that it's never going to be _him_ , and so it's always a winning game for him. He always wants to put himself in the place of the loser."

"What does _that_ mean," Taemin says, beleaguered.

"It means that he's going to throw a fit if he doesn't get what he wants." Ten performs the same correction with a second soldier, but with more intent this time, his touch lingering. It's disgusting, Taemin decides, to see someone be flirted with if it isn't him.

Where did that come from? he wonders, then chalks it up to not having been touched by another being in quite some time.

"Do you know where I can get fucked?" he asks Ten upon his second return. "I think it would be best for everyone involved if I could just get fucked the one time, don't you? After all, no one likes a grumpy teacher."

Ten tips his head just slightly, seeming to think about it, but then his concentration is broken as he sees a fight break out not but a few dozen yards away. The clanging of armour upon armour as punches are thrown aren’t enough to break Taemin from his own distraction. "Hold that thought," he commands, dashing over to the spot.

Taemin, for one, hasn't experienced this level of hopelessness since he thought he was going to die. But, at the very least, it's good to have a friend who _tries_ to care. Better than all those courtiers who make a mockery of him when they think he can't hear or, worse yet, _understand_ what they're saying.

He tucks his hands into the pockets of his cloak, and sighs a great sigh, and watches the fight break out, sidling up to an onlooker who’s taking bets in an attempt to spend some hard-earned coin.

///

Their fourth lesson, if Taemin is counting it right, sees Jongin in padded armour, a fact about which the prince is particularly pleased. He parades about, a peacock in his own private garden, attended to by an audience of himself, and it’s he who applauds him for everything he chooses to do.

It might be sad, were it not also strangely endearing, seeing him with his chest puffed and pride twinkling childish in his eyes.

"Why are you doing that?" Taemin asks, sullen. Ten had not made good on his promise and found him somewhere to be touched by the hands of a stranger, and as such Taemin's mood grows darker with each passing hour. "You look ridiculous. Do you think someone you're fighting is going to give a single damn about how you look in your armour? They're going to be far more concerned about keeping their life, especially if it'll cost you yours."

Jongin, a master at arguments in which he is the assumed victor if nothing else, has figured out that this is the way to get Taemin to stop berating him at the very least. "Perhaps they'll care if they know where I'm from," he insists, and Ten's advice rings true to Taemin's ears, at least right now. "Perhaps they'll simply take me for ransom instead."

Exasperated, Taemin throws up his hands. "Well, perhaps if you'd prefer to be ransomed and sold into slavery at the end of it all--" He ignores the scandalised noises he receives in response to _that_ lovely notion, "then I'm wasting my time here trying to teach you."

"I don't think you're wasting your time here," Jongin murmurs in dissent.

"Oh, come now, you're only saying that because I'm letting you dress up for the occasion." Taemin rolls his eyes and goes over to the weapons rack.

"Would you prefer I dress down?" Jongin asks, sidling up behind Taemin, arms around his middle. His breath is hot against the shell of Taemin’s ear when he speaks again. "Or undress?"

"Would you fucking _stop_ , Jongin?" Taemin pulls out of the embrace, hand already around a training sword which he pulls from its spot on the rack. It hangs limp at his side, he being nowhere near bad enough in temperament now to hold it to Jongin's throat.

The thought lingers a bit longer than he'd admit to, though. 

Instead he presses it into Jongin’s now open hand. Jongin looks a bit like he’s been stricken, but that doesn’t cue Taemin that he’s taking it too far. "Truly. You upset me when you try and hold these conversations. They're unbecoming of a young prince -- no, don't say what I know you're about to say." Jongin closes his mouth, pouts some more, like it's going to help save him in this, his hour of stupidly-plotted need. "They're _unseemly_ of a young prince and, more to the point," and here Taemin tips back his head, "they only work in a fight if you're as beautiful as I am."

Jongin seems to think this over a long time, glancing from his teacher’s face to the sword in his hand. Taemin, taking pity on his poor head, gently flicks his ear. It's a rush, to be able to touch a prince without consequence. Even more so knowing that he's the only one permitted. His skin thrills with it, from his toes to the back of his head. He takes back the sword, since it seems to be confusing Jongin. "Pick something. I don't care what as long as it isn't sharp."

"You've got me on wooden things!" Jongin protests, but he does as he's told.

Taemin keeps his comment to himself, though it’s a physical effort, his hand clamped tight over his mouth.

They stalk in silence to the courtyard. After the cacophony that has been accompanying Ten at his practises, it's nice to see such an open space, to hear it, to smell the grass and the trees as they are. Better that than masked by the scent of sweat and fear to which Taemin has unfortunately become accustomed. Jongin, chomping already at the chance to face his new teacher in a duel, whirls around, playtime sword raised. "Who goes there?" he demands, like a play actor.

Taemin does his best not to hang his head in secondhand mortification. It's a difficult feat. "Put that down," he sighs. He closes the gap between the two of them, his own wooden sword bouncing against his hip as he moves, and forces the sword down. "First we're going to work on form."

"It doesn't seem you need to work on yours," mutters Jongin darkly. There is something very serious inside Taemin that wants to rip the urge to do as much from Jongin's very center. "Fine. Show me your ways, teacher. Perhaps I'll not have your head today."

_You won't have my head any day,_ thinks Taemin, the bitter metal of his own blood oozing from a wound he'd bitten into the inner of his bottom lip. He circles Jongin slowly, giving him a good, long look. Then he reaches in, hands against Jongin's hips, directly behind him so that he can rest his forehead against Jongin's nape.

If he wants to, of course. But up above, in the open passageway between the east and west wings of the castle, someone Taemin can't identify, goes on their way about some business. It doesn't take but a second for him to remember himself. Instead he clears his throat. "Square yourself. Hips first. Shoulders are important, but your hips are going to be your center of gravity when you're just standing here."

If Jongin leans back into him, Taemin pretends it's just a coincidence.

"I've been in a fight before," Jongin points out sourly, lifting his head to peer up at the late-autumn sun as it filters through the courtyard's various foliage. 

Taemin ignores this in favour of helping Jongin straighten out his shoulders. His fingertips linger just a touch too long on the supple curve of Jongin's bicep. His breath catches in his throat, and he'd be smart to ignore the way his groin pulls, compass pointing to the north directly in front of him.

He tucks the hilt of the practise sword into Jongin's palm, and frowns. "You say you've been in a fight," he says, aware that his breath must tickle the back of Jongin's neck as he speaks, "but you've never been in one with me, and you won't ever get the chance to do so if you keep that up."

The way Jongin's breath hitches can't possibly be incidental as well, but Taemin's doing too good a job at pretending to give up the game just yet. "Do you mean to fight me?" asks the prince, turning to look over his shoulder in Taemin's direction. Amusement and fear twinkle in his appraising gaze, equal measures of each bringing to him a life that Taemin can't say he wants to see.

There's a sudden shout from the tower to the south, and in his clumsiness, Jongin waves his sword hand around, a half-circle sweep. The practise weapon, dull as it may be, would not do its job if it didn't hurt, and when it catches Taemin just beneath his rib, he yelps, jumps back.

"What in the gods' names are you doing?" he demands, clutching at his side as if he's been truly stabbed. "Be _careful_."

"I heard something--"

"As did I," says Taemin acidly, opening his cloak to make sure his garments haven't been ruined by his subject's foolishness, being part of a careful collection made over many a long year. The site of the wound throbs, and he grimaces down the neckline of his shirt, knowing full well it will bruise later.

An accident, but a painful one. The parallel is not lost on Taemin one inch.

"Do you want to go see what it was?" he asks Jongin, that same edge to his voice as before, for different reasons. "I don't know what you could possibly _do_ about whatever it is, and your precious guard will probably take care of it--"

"It's fine," says Jongin, biting his bottom lip. "You're right. I can't do anything. Everyone is more qualified than me."

Is that a tinge of bitterness Taemin hears? He tugs at his earlobe, neverminding his injury, just so he can be sure he's understanding correctly. Then he resumes his task, hands at the narrow column of Jongin's waist.

Jongin, for once, does not have anything off-putting to murmur into Taemin's ear. Taemin is grateful for the break, if not the show that the Prince has a side to him that isn't near as pompous as anyone's yet presumed.

He's a quick study -- Taemin has to give the Prince that much, though he's hesitant to do so. He corrects his form with a quickness that astounds Taemin, he being too wrapped up in the image he's been presented. Whoever had been Taemin's predecessor, he thinks, had been a great teacher, someone who could have given Taemin himself a lesson or two in the art of dealing with spoiled brats who think they're too good for wooden weaponry.

"I want to fight," Jongin says, after ten scores' worth of swinging practise. "This is something I've already learned."

"I know it is," Taemin says, hating the way he can't control his sudden, intrinsic need to soothe rather than discipline. He was taught hard, after all; it wouldn't do for him to go soft just because he can taste the gentle air of sweat between them, all of Jongin's efforts beading on his skin. "I know. And that's fine, I'm happy that you know, but I don't know everything that lives beneath that pretty circlet you wear."

Jongin grins, lowering his practise sword so that the tip rests against the footstep-tilled earth beneath them. "You think it's pretty?" he asks, alight. "My father had it made especially for me, it was my mother's last request before giving birth to me." And there's not a touch of sadness when he talks about his dead mother. _Why should there be?_ thinks Taemin, _he's likely never met the woman. Can't miss something you've never had._

"It's pretty," Taemin confirms, biting at the still-sore wound tucked into the inside of his bottom lip, nagging at him to be torn apart a second time. "It's not the point. The point is that I don't know what you know, because your last teacher is gone."

Jongin does dim, a bit, at this prospect. "Yes," he agrees, a touch uneasy and refusing to meet Taemin's eyes when he reaches between them to correct the set of Jongin's shoulders. "A shame. I quite liked him. He was a bit like you."

Taemin ignores the potential for implications here in favour of swiping a bead of sweat from the crook of Jongin's neck. When Jongin resumes practise, distracted by form, by tiny verbal corrections Taemin makes aloud -- "Straighten your hips, please, mind them well" -- Taemin presses the slick pad of his thumb to the flat of his tongue. It is as if he is drinking the finest ale any man has ever made with his own two hands.

He does not yet buy into the myth that kings and their sons are borne of God Itself, but he thinks should he get to taste this sweat directly from the source, he might come to believe.

///

That night, when at last he retires -- after a good dinner, spent with Ten and his guard of arrowhead sharp archers -- Taemin collapses into his bed, luxuriates in the softness with which he's swaddled. Another good thing about working for the richest king on the continent, he thinks, as he struggles to tuck his weary limbs into himself. The urge to curl up in spite of the bruises that riddle him like a pox is too real for him to deny. Still, sleep hovers over him, its hands outstretched and ready to take his, lead him into dreams.

He shifts, rolls onto his back, and a particular injury doesn't like the exact pressure of the bed beneath him. A shudder of pleasure roils through him, and he can remember exactly how he'd gotten this one.

Jongin, having been far too thrilled to finally pick up a weapon against his teacher, had swung too quickly, caught Taemin before he was ready. The blunt edge of his wooden sword had connected with the bottom left curve of Taemin's ribcage. Though the padded armour he wore -- matching Jongin's, placating him -- had been enough that he didn't feel it quite as hard as he might have, normally, it still hurt. The impact, he could tell, would be lasting. He promised himself he'd see a healer in the morning, if only so he could get one of those lovely, pepper-fed salves of which they tend to be so fond.

He shifts again, a little more intentional this time, and the same pleasure presses against his spine, against his inner thighs, against the constant, slow simmer that toils away in his belly. "Jongin," he mutters darkly under his breath, unable to contain his disdain. Except, he realises in a flash, it is not disdain at all. He rather likes the way his cock twitches to life, stirring the way a lover might at first dawn, before the rest of the world has awoken.

It is in this moment that Taemin knows he's got to find someone else to sleep with, and the sooner the better. He makes a note to visit Ten, ask him about the local spots, the houses with the finest whores. For now, though, he rolls a third time, pressing into that bruise just so and drawing a moan from his own lips.

Recalling, hazily, the events of the day, he presses his fingertips into the bruise at his sternum, and earns himself a pure gasp. He mutters the Prince's name again, a touch more urgent this time, and unlaces his breeches, hands fumbling with the urgency of it all.

///

It would be silly of Taemin to admit that he cannot look Jongin in the eye the next day, but the fact remains that he can’t. 

He only sees the Prince once, it being an off day for their usually scheduled lessons. He’s near to the throne room, which Taemin passes daily when going to visit the practise fields, chatting up some sweet summer thing. He leans against the wall with one hand, and the other lingers at the young man’s elbow.

Taemin ducks his head in shame, ears burning with the memory of the night prior, but he does not move on, like a proud man might. Instead he finds himself ducking back round the corner he’d just turned, listening in on the conversation between the Prince and the flavour he’s chosen to savour this week.

For what it’s worth, the poor bastard is handsome, in a way that Taemin usually notices but chooses not to comment on. He’s small, but slim, and looks like his waist could bend in any number of ways. Worst of all his eyes sparkle with eagerness, and he breaks into ridiculously high-pitched laughter whenever Jongin says anything.

Pathetic. No wonder Jongin’s turned out the way he has. The ass-kissing around here must break everyone’s backs.

Still, he watches, eyes narrowing a fraction as he focuses on the intention with which Jongin converses. It is as if there is nothing else in the world besides this young man with whom he is speaking. His touches stay when they’re granted, but they’re enver inappropriate. Perhaps this is a man capable of respect after all? Taemin must fight to keep himself from scoffing at the motion. Speculation, after all, is a low art form.

From behind, some many-ringed duke knocks into him, a crown made of base materials encircling his head. He offers Taemin a wicked smirk. “Oops.” As if he’s caught someone doing something. “My mistake. You wouldn’t happen to be eavesdropping on someone, would you?”

Taemin does feel seen. Disgustingly so. He shoots a glare the glittering man’s way and dips around the corner.

“Your Highness,” Taemin greets, attempting to hurry past.

Jongin ducks his head in apology to his conversational partner, tweaking his ear. The young thing he’d been flirting with scrunches up his shoulders, but it would be stupid not to notice the colour racing from his cheeks all the way down his throat. “Teacher,” greets Jongin as he falls in step with Taemin.

Taemin ignores him, intent on finding the practise yards before letting some brat he can’t even talk to embarrass him in front of all the people wandering the castle’s corridors.

“Teacher,” insists Jongin. Gods, can’t he take a hint? “Assassin. _Viper_.”

This one, at least, deserves some acknowledgment. “Do not call me that in company,” Taemin demands, stopping so quickly that Jongin ends up a few paces ahead of him. “Do not call me that ever, for any reason. You have not earned the right.”

“Just a name I heard you liked to be called,” says Jongin, shrugging it off his shoulders the way a duck would water. Typical. Nothing improper should reach a prince’s ears, after all. “Listen, I know we’re meant to see one another tomorrow--”

“Unfortunately,” mutters Taemin, dark, looking anywhere but in the Prince’s open and eager face.

“--but there’s a court session I must attend in the afternoon. I was wondering if we could have a lesson early this evening instead?”

That surprises Taemin; he’d half convinced himself that Jongin would grow tired of their lessons and demand to sit them out. He lifts his head at last, and surveys what he sees. In the moment, Jongin is not some rival, nor some spoiled thing who needs to be treated with a delicacy that Taemin has never learned. Right now, he is simply a man, trying to learn all that he can in the time he is given.

“Fine,” says Taemin after a pregnant pause. “This afternoon, after lunch is cleaned up. For now I’ve an appointment.” And he tries to brush past a second time, but as per usual, Jongin will not let himself be ignored. “What is it _now_ , Your Highness?”

“It’s just…” Jongin doesn’t let himself be outpaced. At least he’s got that going for him, though his sword-swinging is still clumsy. Taemin notes this for later. “I want to know if you’re well.”

“Why?” asks Taemin, hackles raising. “Have you heard some sort of gossip to the contrary? Has some bird put it in your ears that I might not be?” He tucks his hands into the pockets of his breeches and thumbs over the material so that he does not begin to gesticulate. “If I am too unwell to continue our lessons, then that is none of your business until it is. You do not have to pretend as if it matters to you how I feel today.”

The thoughts are laced through with regret as soon as they’re dumped out into the open. He reminds himself that it’s for safety, nothing less.

At least it gets Jongin to stop following him.

He thinks he might hear the Prince apologise, but he can’t be certain when he’s all but running into the open doorway in an attempt to once and for all leave him behind. 

The cold winter sun greets Taemin with kisses upon his cheeks, and all at once his chagrin is forgotten. Before him opens up the practise yards. Ten still has not returned from whatever scouting mission he’s meant to attend, but that doesn’t mean that Taemin must get his jollies alone.

After a brief series of inquiries, he is met with his captors, the young guards Yukhei and Yangyang. The pair of them regard him with suspicion as they cross the field, elbow-to-elbow, a mismatched set of siblings. Taemin smiles at them upon their approach.

“Hello,” he says, “would either of you like to try and best me in a fight? Perhaps both of you at the same time?” He knows he glows something wicked, but if knowing them for three days straight had taught him anything it is that neither of them are very good at resisting competition.

They glance at one another dumbly, and then Yangyang steps forward. “Me first,” he says, with a surprising amount of grit to his voice. “I’ve wanted to spar with you since you killed our fourth.” Already he has drawn his sword from his back, a thing broader than his own thigh, and Taemin chuckles low in his throat.

“Don’t show me that thing if you aren’t prepared to use it,” he teases, and draws his own sword from its scabbard. He watches the way the child guard’s hands tighten around the hilt of his blade, the gentle labour of his breathing, the flush high in his cheeks. 

They stare at one another across this field of battle a lingering moment.

Then Yangyang charges, teeth grit, sword swung over his right shoulder. 

Taemin lets his blade linger at his side, choosing instead to step out of the course Yangyang’s broadsword cuts toward him. It’s easier than he might have thought. The boy’s eyes broadcast everything. He’ll have to unlearn that habit. Instead of engaging just yet Taemin takes continual steps to the right, only blocking with his own blade when he must. He steps in patterns according to the movements of his partner. Left, right, left, back, back, left. A dance he’s long since learned. His own fault for picking fights with children, for letting himself get so frustrated that he thought this might be a good idea.

Eventually, even Yangyang’s youthful spirit tires, and he heaves with exertion. The tip of his sword nearly drags against the ground. It is then that Taemin strikes. He is the one leading their dance now, rushing, prepared to take a life to keep his own if he must. 

Not that he thinks it that dire, of course. Not that this is anything but a friendly spar. 

His strikes come closer together, the lightness of his arm and the quickness of his feet his only true skills on the field of battle. His blood quickens and his heart races as he zigs this way and dashes that. Otherwise, he stays impassive. More than once the clang of his sword against armour rings through the field, he connecting with chest, with hip, with thigh. The other soldiers have stopped their own practises in order to watch the spar. Their cheers and jeers come in equal measure. Taemin is surprised to hear a fair share of supporters calling out predictions in his favour. 

Eventually, though, all things must come to an end. His blade finds a gap between the close press of Yangyang’s arm to his torso, wiggles into the joint on his armour, stops before reaching flesh.

“Stop,” declares Yukhei, knuckles bloodless white and wrapped around the hilt of his sword, still tucked safely in its scabbard. Both Taemin and his opponent look to the young guard with surprise in their eyes, sweat dripping down their foreheads. “Viper is the winner.”

Taemin grins, in spite of the nickname which makes his veins chill with displeasure.

“Please don’t call me that,” he asks the child, and then the child’s companion when he toddles close enough. “It’s bad enough hearing it from Ten, or the Prince, or, Gods forbid, the King himself.”

Yukhei, for one, nods solemnly. Taemin resolves to ask Yangyang again later, when his head is more clear and the salt of his own sweat no longer blurs his vision. 

“Ready for another one?” Taemin is the one to suggest a second round. He faces the crowd that has gathered to watch him do what he does best. “I’m sure you’re all bored with shooting apples and whacking dummies with wooden blades. Who wants to see some bloodshed?”

The crowd of gathered men roar their enthusiastic agreement, and Taemin grins brightly.


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Everyone falls in love with the prince at least once. I’m glad you’ve come to your senses early, if nothing else.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLOOOOOOO, there is side pairing (read: taemin/ten) smut in here. sorta. it's like, alluded to? not super graphic. it exists. i'm not sorry But it's there in case you don't wanna read it. the scene breaks, starts with "there are several things" and ends with "just beyond his window".

Jongin is waiting for him, when Taemin reaches the courtyard that is their classroom that afternoon. The sun hangs high among broken, silver clouds, casting Jongin in a sickle of light that paints him as closer to man than god. He is practising his swings with his wooden training blade; by the look of him, the sweat beading at his temple and pooling in his clavicle, he’s been here awhile. He stops only when Taemin calls out to him, some half-hearted grunt. “You’re here early,” he says.

Jongin practically jumps out of his skin. Taemin barks out a laugh at this -- he knows the place in which Jongin had just been, has been there many times himself, too focused on the task of sharpening one’s skills to notice the world around him. Upon getting a look at his teacher Jongin’s face contorts into something almost concerned. “What happened to you?” he demands. The furrow of his brow is handsome, even still. Taemin hates himself for noticing.

“What do you mean?” he asks, looking down and inspecting himself for some whisper of lunch left upon his blacks.

Jongin crosses the distance between them. His fool’s blade clatters to the stunes beneath his feet as he makes his approach. A hand reaches up, cradles Taemin’s jaw tenderly, thumb at the hinge as if imploring Taemin to open his mouth. “You’ve been bleeding,” he states. “Your lip is covered in it.”

This, Taemin decides, would explain the heap of giggles and terrified stares he’d gotten during his mealtime. He hadn’t managed to get back to his room between fighting with the soldiers and now, and hadn’t seen the mess his face had become.

Jongin’s hand drops from his face, takes him by the wrist instead, dragging him inside. They navigate corridors in silence. When it breaks it is Jongin’s doing. “What happened?” he asks, pulling Taemin sharply around a corner, in the direction of the infirmary.

Taemin sniffs, and his nose fills with iron and rust. “Trying to finish the job I was meant to start with your father,” he quips in return. “You know, for a fat bastard, he’s fairly quick. Caught me by surprise.”

Jongin laughs, but it’s a discomfortable sound, one that fills the hallway by how big, how false it is. They’re quiet again. When they reach the room where all the poultices and salves are kept, he lets Taemin go at last. Taemin rubs at his wrist, sure he’ll have fingerprint bruises in the slim column of sinew later.

A blessing, though one he doesn’t count, knowing himself all too well.

Instead of focusing on this, Taemin memorises the room: rows of pristine canvas cots, pillows and silken blankets folded at their feet. Chests every so often, presumably containing supplies for any 

From a chest Jongin pulls a few clean strips of cloth bandage, a bowl. He dips the edge of the bowl in a cistern that fountains over. Taemin’s never seen anything quite like it -- coated in gold, its center figurehead is that of two birds entwined. They both turn their heads ceilingward as they spit the water in crossing streams. “A bit advanced for a medicinal purpose,” he points out.

“Sit,” Jongin commands with a roll of his eyes.

“I’d prefer to stand,” Taemin objects, though he finds his legs carrying him to the edge of a cot regardless of what rebellion he’d like to enact. He plops down; beneath him the cot rocks a little but does not give way. Jongin kneels, setting his bowl down on the stones and dropping his cloths into the water.

“You know you could get in trouble for this,” Taemin warns. His fingers itch, flex, dancing so that he does not put them on the hilt of his favourite blade. It would not befit him to pose a threat to any man while in his current position. “We aren’t meant to be alone together unless it’s while crossing blades.”

The Prince’s nose twitches as his lips quirk upward in a smirk. “I’m sure you’d like that,” he agrees softly as he wrings the cotton strip of excess water. His nose must not be broken, because when Jongin presses that damp cloth to the blood caked to his upper lip, it doesn’t hurt near as badly as his pride does under those tender touches. He flinches away anyway. “Ah, did I hurt you?” murmurs Jongin, devoid of the flirtation that seems to keep him afloat whenever he is in Taemin’s presence. “It was unintentional. Who did this to you?”

“Yukhei,” Taemin says between gritted teeth. The bridge of his nose blooms with pain, but he’s had worse. This is simply a bodily reaction. There is no anguish, no sense of defeat inside him. When Jongin gives him a look of question, Taemin continues, “He’s a guard. One of the ones who brought me in. We are friends of a sort.” Funny, he hadn’t realised that to be the truth, but when he recalls the swell of pride with which he’d met his defeat, he supposes it must be.

“Do friends often shed one another’s blood?” Jongin lacks the teasing edge he might normally. If anything he sounds almost _curious_. As if he does not know.

Taemin realises he probably does not. “Yes,” he says, “sometimes. And sometimes it is other fluids entirely.”

Jongin says nothing, but it is clear from the red colouring the inner of his lower lip that he has been worrying it with his perfect teeth. He wrings out the cloth. The water in the bowl ripples rusty red. When he presses the fabric to Taemin’s face again, it’s to the subtle bow of his upper lip, and Jongin digs in a finger to make sure the rounded edge of the space is clean.

“Why are you being so sweet to me?” asks Taemin, suspicious, shoulders bunching up to his ears when Jongin pulls away. 

Jogin dips the cloth in a bowl full of water again, moves to dab away more crimson flakes from the bow of Taemin’s lip, the line of his septum. “Because it does matter to me whether or not you feel well,” he says.

Taemin, for what it is worth, feels every bit the fool the Prince is trying to make him out to be. “I’m fine,” he insists, stubborn as ever, ducking away from Jongin’s tender hand. “Really. You do not have to be concerned with me.” He pauses, then adds, “I do not deserve this care after the way I spoke to you earlier.” 

His job completed, Jongin drops the fabric into the bowl, climbs to his feet. He busies himself with the cleanup process rather than answer. At last he says, “What way did you speak to me?”

“I was… rude,” Taemin admits. Now it is his turn to bite his lip, gnaw at the inside of his cheek with discomfort. “It is unhelpful of me to act as if we will simply be strangers to one another at the end of all this.”

“And yet, I seem to know you better than anyone else here,” Jongin says. His task complete, he takes a seat upon the chest from which he’d drawn his supplies. His slender fingers wrap around its edge, digging in hard enough that his knuckles turn bloodless. “Maybe not anyone else. I know you are close with people. You seem the type to make friends easily.”

“And yet I have not befriended you,” Taemin points out. “Are we done here? Does my face no longer offend you? I would like to get this lesson done with, I’ve plans for the evening.”

Something flashes in Jongin’s deep eyes, but whatever it is, he contradicts it in word, in deed. “Wouldn’t want to ruin your plans,” he agrees, too quickly, too smoothly for it to be anything but his diplomatic training kicking in. “Let’s get this done with, shall we?”

It is all the more awkward to have to follow Jongin’s lead out of the infirmary, but then, Taemin hadn’t known the room even existed before Jongin had brought him there. He resolves to spend less time idly wandering and more time learning the map of the castle, if only so that he can leave if the situation grows uncomfortable like this again. As it is, their route is an even quieter one than the one they’d taken to get there, and the silence oppresses Taemin with a hand around its mouth. He knows he should apologise, that he’s too quick to run off at the mouth -- but then, isn’t he teaching Jongin a lesson? Shouldn’t a king learn to ignore the petty gossips of his subjects?

“Did you hear,” asks Taemin as they wander back into the quickly-dimming sunshine, the door left flung open behind them, “that there’s someone quite interested in you?”

Jongin gives Taemin the longest, coldest look over his shoulder. “No, I didn’t,” he says, when he’s focused on the thing before him rather than the human behind, “and I didn’t take you as one to listen to those sorts of things. After all, it’s a bit immature.” The thing before him is his practise sword.

Taemin gives it, and the Prince, an appraising glance. “Put that thing away. Bring me something sharp.” It is the closest to an apology that he can get when he’s making the same mistakes repeatedly. “Your choice. I will have knives, so do not worry about…” He trails off, uncertain of the message he is trying to send besides. “Do not worry. Bring me something sharp.”

At least half the hatred melts from Jongin’s gaze. He all but skips away to the weapons room, stowed on the other side of their courtyard. When he returns he’s got a blade at his hip, in a scabbard Taemin can’t remember seeing. He lifts a brow. “Is that the blade you were using with your last teacher?”

Jongin chirps his agreement. His fingers fit around the hilt too perfectly for it to be anything else. Taemin would be lying if he were to deny the flare in his belly that sparks up. “Good. I’m pleased you’ve something balanced for you and not to outfit some soldier with no name.” It is a lie, even then, but he makes it convincing and forces a smile. “Do not draw yet. Check your posture.” While he is giving instruction, circling Jongin’s form with a wide radius, he keeps his hand on the knife tucked into his belt. The sword is a long one, nearly as long as Taemin’s entire leg; though he’s never been keenly aware of the height disparity between the two of them, the weapon Jongin has chosen forces him to be so. It gets worse when he cranes his neck a fraction to correct the set of Jongin’s chin, that he doesn’t give away his plans when he moves. “Shoulders back. Hips square. Take care, Your Highness, that you do not catch the sharp end of these knives.”

“What?” Jongin blinks.

That is as long as it takes for Taemin to cross twin knives at the column of Joning’s throat. “Are you ready?” he asks, low in his throat. He smirks up at the Prince. “Let’s begin, shall we?”

Their dance is inelegant, both of them too competitive for their own good. Taemin’s reasons are weak ones, he realises as Jongin’s sword leaves its sheath. He slashes through the air, diagonal, right to left. Taemin steps just out of reach, his feet feather-light. He feels as if he does not touch the ground, when he is sparring with Jongin.

He whirls, and throws a knife that Jongin only barely manages to sidestep. It sticks in the soft earth behind him, its hilt jutting out of the ground at an odd angle. Taemin makes a noise of discontent. 

They make more advances upon one another -- Jongin and Taemin both moving in the same direction, two people trying to shuffle out of each other’s way. Every so often their blades clash. The sound rings hollow in the courtyard, the only accompaniment the occasional breath of wind rustling through them. Taemin’s teeth chatter at the chill that settles beneath his armour, and then his clothes. It must be obvious that Taemin plans to get his knife back. Jongin blocks every attempt Taemin makes at skating past, elbow pointed skyward as his blade crosses the length of Taemin’s torso.

“Don’t you have more of those?” he asks, between little gasps for breath.

“None quite like that one,” Taemin dissents. He ducks beneath the cage made by Jongin’s awkwardly-held arms. The hilt of his blade connects with the soft spot just beneath Jongin’s sternum. The Prince grunts out his affront, doubling, hand clutched to his gut.

Here is an opening. Taemin takes it. He plucks his blade from the dirt. Triumph rings true in his ears. He is back at the advantage. Though his limbs are weary from all the fighting he’s done today, the blood he’s lost, his veins sing with promises he’s made himself -- that he will be the victor here.

Or, at least, he thinks he might be, but when he turns back to the field of battle, the edge of Jongin's blade points to his own throat. He does not even have time to disarm the Prince, too lost in the sudden syrup his arms and legs have become. 

His teeth grit, he drops his knives. He catches his breath. “Good show,” he admits, begrudging. “Congratulations.”

“I didn’t think you’d fight dirty,” Jongin points out. His own breathing is ragged as he sheaths his sword once again. “The punching--”

_Is deserved,_ Taemin adds silently. “You must learn to fight dirty if you’re meant to survive,” he explains flatly. “Let’s go again another day, shall we? I would very much like to rest.” He ignores the way Jongin glows under victory in a way that the sunlight, quickly dimming, cannot explain.

“Whatever you need, teacher,” agrees Jongin. “Please let me know when that is. Three days from now, hm?”

Taemin doesn’t agree aloud. He simply collects his weapons, tucks them into their rightful place, and stalks off the courtyard ground. Defeat has never looked good on him, he supposes. And anyway, he aches too badly -- in pride as well as in body -- to bid anyone, least of all royalty, a proper goodbye.

Jongin calls after him, but by the time Taemin thinks to respond, the door leading into his wing of the castle has already closed behind him.

///

Lessons only take place thrice a week, something for which Taemin is equal parts grateful and irritated. He strolls the grounds when the weather is sunny enough to fight against the cold, the snow that threatens but never falls. On a day like this one -- one during which the weather gives in to its worse inclinations -- he's little to do at all. Not to mention, Ten's been sent on some horrible scouting mission, which leaves him doubly alone.

He takes his breakfast in the lesser of the two serving halls, where the guard and the palace's more high-ranking servants tend to gather, and listens to inane chatter as a means of passing the time. Who's fucking who, and why, and who's got orders to give up their claims, and who's been arranged into this marriage or that one. 

It's only when the hall's cleared out some, and Taemin is sipping at some dark, gently alcoholic drink the likes of which they don't have down south, touched with milk and honey, when he finally hears the Prince addressed in turn.

"He's taken another one," some high lady is saying, with all the confidence someone of her status doesn't deserve. Her face is hidden behind a fan, only her catlike eyes exposed and she batting her eyelashes uselessly at an advisor who's too busy giving his assistant significant glances to notice her poor attempts at flirtation. "I heard him dragged away in the early morning. They brought him right by my chambers, and it pulled me right out of the dream I was having--"

"No, another one?" asks the assistant, though his morbid curiosity is clearly fake, and easily replaced by scandalised giggling. "Another one. That's three in the last fortnight. And for what? To fuck a prince?" He laughs out, a derisive note. "It isn't like he could _tell_ anyone what he'd done, so it certainly wasn't for bragging rights."

"Sometimes," says the advisor of their party, glancing his assistant up and down, "we sleep with someone for _love_ rather than simply talking about it." And there's something going on there, a tiny drama the likes of which Taemin would gladly indulge in were he not so nervous about the implications of their conversation.

When he goes back to his bedchamber, heart heavy with some strange cousin of fear, Taemin finds several things amiss. The first is that his knives have been moved about. The case in which he keeps them on days he does not intend on needing them is no longer on the chest. Instead it’s been moved to the bedside table. The second is that his bed is slightly askew, the sheets he'd drawn up himself made a mess of, as if someone besides himself has slept here.

The third is that beneath the leather roll of knives is tucked a book with a silver-embossed cover, titled in a language Taemin had thought he'd forgotten in his years away from home -- the tongue of the common people of the south.

He squints at it as he passes the volume between one hand and the other, suspicious, and looks for some note, some indication of his benevolent favour supplier as they may have intended to be. When he finds none, he unrolls his knives, checking to see that none of them have been taken. It is not the case; in fact, they have been sharpened.

There, beneath the spot where his favourite knife resides, is a tiny scroll, scribbled on in an equally tiny script. _I thought you might like this,_ says the note, and Taemin drops it as if it burns him. The note flutters to the floor, and he tosses the book onto his unmade bed.

He does not know where to find a Prince, on his days off, but he knows where he might look first.

The courtroom is the first place he goes. He's pleased to see it filled with courtiers and petitioners alike, the latter in neat and even rows while the former scatters in clusters of four and five, decorating the room the way flowers might. He stares up at the raised throne, only slightly smaller than his father's, and there is the Prince, bored as ever, with his fist tucked beneath his chin. He seems to squirm in his seat more often, and though it's a foolish tack to take, Taemin must admit he's pleased by it. He doesn't want to be the only one left changed by their practise sessions.

At one point, the Prince crosses his legs, and Taemin strains to see what might be the reason. Some gossipy young maid shoves him out of her way, trying to get the details so she might bring them back to her fellow sculleries. Taemin glares acid her direction, and by the time he's regained his footing, he can see nothing.

The only time he gets to glimpse the gentle light that emanates from Jongin is when his father turns cases over to him. These occurrences are few and far between, so much so that Taemin must pay attention to them. At one point he is asked to rule on a thief, a skinny lad with a family to feed. The young man had stolen carrots from his neighbour's garden, and cried and confessed to his crime soon as he was accused. Even now, he cries, tears streaming silently down his face.

Taemin, for the record, pities him. It's clear by the gaunt around his eyes, the heaviness of his feet, the exhaustion with which he moves that he hasn't eaten properly himself in quite some time. He remembers those days for himself, and prays under his breath that the Prince might grant him some mercy.

When the case is officially handed to Jongin, he says with a bored sort of confidence, "Please approach me, young subject." At the very least, he sounds the part. Taemin notes this, too, if only because it's the sole part of the job Jongin is good at, and because that's the least important part thus far.

The young man shuffles forward, head hung low.

"Look at me," says Jongin, gentle, all the cocksureness that he'd displayed before melting away in an instant.

He raises his eyes, meets Jongin's critical gaze.

"Why did you steal the carrots?" he asks quietly, as if there is no one else in the room. All the courtiers and guards and advisors in attendance hold their breath. "Please, tell me. I simply want to know."

"My mother is ill," says the young man, wringing his hands before him, something anxious to him. "She needed the vegetables or she'd have never gotten better."

And something inexplicable softens in Jongin's face. It is truly a beauty to behold, thinks Taemin as he, too, wrings his hands. "Do you love your mother?" he asks.

"I do," says the boy, for that is what he has become before his Crown Prince. "I truly do, and if she dies I won't have anyone to help me take care of my sisters. It'll be just us, no one else." He cries again, less silently this time, a sob wracking his shoulders. Taemin feels that same pity he'd experienced initially, but now to the marrow of his bones, cold with it. "And if you decide to jail me, then my mother will still die, and my sisters will have even less than they would if--"

"What do you need?" Jongin interrupts, a hand held up.

The boy seems to consider this a long time. Then he says, "I need someone to take care of my sisters. There's two of them, and none's prettier than them. They'll make good wives someday, if that's what they want to be, and they're smart, and good at what they do."

"You know that stealing is wrong, though," Jongin explains with a patience Taemin's never seen before.

The boy, silent, hangs his head.

"So what I can do for you," Jongin continues, "is have you come back once your mother gets better or doesn't." The plaintiff in this case squawks a protest, but falls quiet with a raise of the King's hand. "You will be punished for your crime, sir, regardless of whether or not you had good intentions. That is how we learn, is by doing the wrong thing and facing the consequences. It is how we grow as people. But no mother deserves to die alone."

There is a chill that settles over the courtroom, then, drawing the breath from the lungs of everyone in attendance.

"When you come back, I will give you your sentence." The boy starts to break down, but Jongin quietly shushes him. "And I will give your sisters jobs, here at the castle. Can they cook?" The boy nods. "Can they clean?" Nods again. "Then they will do well, here. They will do very well. And you, sir, will learn your lesson, and go home at the end of it all."

The young man's face lights, something hopeful glimmering in his eyes.

Around the court, the lords' and ladies' whispering rises, birds' wings as they make their ascent. What the Prince has done here is controversial, and Taemin can be sure they wanted that boy's hand cut off. That would have taught him.

It is at this moment that Taemin realises that Jongin will, in time, make a popular king, but not a good one. As such, his job is twice as hard as Taemin thought it might be.

He flees the scene, court not yet adjourned but he being unable to stomach much more, a sourness settling into the center of him. He can't shake it, nor is he certain he wants to.

Only when he's back in his chamber, the book splayed out beside him and Taemin propped up on an elbow paging through its contents, does he remember the reason he'd gone to court in the first place. He scowls. The bastard is far too charming for his own good, and Taemin knows himself to be outclassed, if not in battle, then at least in courtly manners.

///

There are several things one can learn by fighting someone, Taemin has learned over the years. Too many of them have nothing to do with strength, and everything to do with endurance, reach, quickness.

It is because of this, because of studying the way in which he trains his soldiers, that he should have known how Ten would be in bed, though the fact that he’d allowed himself to be surprised is pleasant. Enjoyable. That doesn’t stop either of them from flirting, Taemin’s complaint from nearly a fortnight before fresh on both their minds when they totter down to the inn at which Ten usually takes his drinks.

“So I heard you were looking for a good fuck,” Ten says when they’re seated and the conversation around them grows too loud for them to be overheard. 

“I am always looking for a fuck,” Taemin retorts, snorting, forgetting in a oment all the manners he’s worked so hard to cultivate recently. “Whether or not they’re good is for me to decide privately.”

Ten arches a brow. “I happen to know one or two,” he says, challenging as he leans in, a hand tucked beneath his cheek. He’s flushing, prettily so, across the bridge of his nose where the sun has kindly dotted just a couple freckles. “But you’re my friend, aren’t you?” He reaches across the space between them with his spare hand, brushes a stray lock of hair from Taemin’s forehead. The serving maid, poor girl, wanders by, intends on taking their orders. Taemin shushes her with a finger.

“I’m your friend,” he agrees readily, knowing all too well where this is going.

Tonight, there is something different about Ten -- the way his smile turns just this side of sly, the way he bats his eyelashes just enough, not the way to which Taemin had been accustomed. He orders both their drinks -- a silly gesture, really, their purses full from the same pocket -- and quickly they’re tipsy on the same spiced wine that had greeted Taemin on his arrival to his new job. It’s familiar, a comfort, reminiscent of that last night in the woods, of Ten offering liquor he probably wasn’t supposed to have, a gesture of peace between the two of them.

Ten, Taemin realises all at once, is dazzling, and though Taemin’s long since learned to be wary of being dazzled, he lets it happen.

“What’s got you so pent up?” Ten asks, feigning innocence, his thumb brushing the curve of Taemin’s cheek.

Tonight, Taemin rests his hand atop Ten’s thigh beneath the table. Ten, enamoured of danger, lets him linger for far too long, answers in kind when he drags the toe of his boot along the back of Taemin’s calf.

And Taemin, well, he’s tired of resisting, of hiding even in front of his friends. So he tells the whole thing all in one breath: “I hate this prince you’ve got me taking care of, he’s surprisingly good at fighting even when I don’t give him anything to fight with and he’s such a _brat_ even when I give him what he wants and he’s _fucking_ considerate even when I never once asked him to consider me.”

Ten, for what it’s worth, glitters with the danger presented him. “Oh, darling,” he says, trying to be calm, though there’s a certain fear in his eyes. “Everyone falls in love with the prince at least once. I’m glad you’ve come to your senses early, if nothing else.”

There are so many things they should have realised, Taemin realises. They stumble back to the castle, arm in arm, occasionally trading jokes about how inevitable this had been. They aren’t trading kisses, of course, pressed to dusty brick exteriors, the backs of their cloaks clung to by the occasional snowflake or cobweb. 

There are so many things he had never taken care to note before now.

For one, Ten is softer than he looks like he might be, his skin well-tended and distinctly devoid of most scars. Taemin acquaints himself with every single one, few and far between as they might be, marking them beneath his own warm and careful lips. He knows they have stories; he’s got his own, he knows how it goes. A part of him wants to ask, but when Ten’s fingers thread into his hair, he forgets any notion of conversation. A blessing, he thinks. For another, Ten’s a wiggler, giggles out some profanity or another whenever Taemin’s caress finds him. He should have known this, too, if only because every archer Taemin’s ever known has been jumpy, quick to the draw -- a skill that saves their lives, more often than not, but makes them utterly _exhausting_ in bed. For a third, Taemin had known coming in how badly he needed this, how much he still does; he throbs whenever Ten breathes too hard beneath him, his ribcage expanding only to collapse into a shudder with every time Taemin’s teeth sink into his skin. 

He had not known how much he could cling to a notion, that he treasures this time learning someone else’s body as much as he does his own head.

They tangle before ever making it back to Taemin’s room, licking desperately into one another’s mouth, teasing one another with a press of hips to hips. In the low light of the castle at night, Ten looks stunning. An angel of angles, a prince among guard paupers, worthy of further inspection, if not outright devotion the likes of which Taemin knows himself to be incapable of giving. He arches so prettily beneath Taemin’s hand that perhaps, he thinks, he could get used to this.

When Ten does the same, though, Taemin murmurs the name of the very last person he’d like to think, in a moment like this one. Ten stops, as if he’s been stabbed in the gut, stock-still even as he’s still got his palm cupped around Taemin’s breech-clothed cock.

“What did you say?” he asks slowly, dangerously, mouth barely moving.

In his fumble for an answer that won’t get him killed, Taemin takes Ten’s hand from him, drags him through the corridors in silence. They do, at last, make it to his room, though the air of anticipation between them has dissipated. Taemin closes the door behind them so quietly that he is sure someone is watching him now.

“I didn’t mean it,” he starts, lamely, tugging at the hem of his tunic, trying to force himself to meet Ten’s eyes.

Ten, merciful, closes the space between them, tips Taemin’s chin up with a finger. “Is that what you want from me?” he asks in a whisper. “For me to pretend to be the prince for you? I could do it, if you could keep quiet about it in places where ears might overhear you asking it of me.”

And Taemin knows he doesn’t deserve a friend like Ten, not when he’s so filthy with guilt that he thinks he might drown in it. But for his answer he takes Ten’s face between his quivering hands, and kisses him, an agreement all on its own.

“Be yourself,” Taemin instructs between kisses. “Please. I don’t know what came over me.”

Ten arches a brow, thumbs pressing into the divot of Taemin’s collarbone. “Whatever you like,” he says. If he seems to take this denial of what must be a fun game for him as a loss, he doesn’t say it.

Taemin would be a fool to deny that he’s disappointed in himself, but when Ten swallows him down, pressed there against the wall of his bedchamber, any and all regret disappears into the night just beyond his window. 

///

The snow falls in the courtyard when they have their next lesson. Taemin tries not to slip in the light dusting that coats the ground. Judging by the number of missteps Jongin makes, he’s doing the same.

“We could just,” interjects Taemin, between parries, “go inside. Work on sharpening weapons.” _Do literally anything that does not involve potentially falling onto our swords,_ his brain adds, unhelpfully.

Jongin doesn’t answer, only grits his teeth and charges again. His pommel catches Taemin just below his ribs. It would knock the wind from a weaker man.

They dance. It’s an inelegant act between the pair of them, if only because the powder gathering at their feet threatens to knock them over. It doesn’t, but in time they reach an impasse: Taemin with his beloved knife pointed at Jongin’s throat, blocked only by the slant of Jongin’s sword against his chest.

They stare at one another, trying to catch their breath which plumes around their faces. The side of Jongin’s blade presses into Taemin’s sternum.

His leather armour wouldn’t stand a chance. Jongin has sharpened this blade to an impressive gleam, something he would not have done just a few short weeks ago. (Has it been weeks? Taemin wonders. Does time pass so slowly? It feels like it’s been years since he’s started training this man.) Taemin narrows his eyes, and drops his knife. “Again,” he says.

Jongin scoffs but says nothing. He charges again.

Their sparring goes on for hours, the little slivers of daylight they are afforded dying quickly. The torches go up around the courtyard, lit by some guard who occasionally stops to watch them as they make all the best, most strategic steps to tear one another to shreds. More than once Taemin nearly topples over, though it’s due to the ferocity with which Jongin comes at him rather than any strategic move on his part.

As if he wants to end Taemin, here and now. As if he’s learned enough to do so.

“What are you not saying?” asks Taemin between jabs, the two of them never quite reaching that same stalemate they’d already achieved once. The sentences come out stilted. His need to know outweighs his desire to keep himself safe. “You know you’re meant to study your opponent’s demeanour. I see there’s something wrong. You’re clumsy. You’re impassioned. Tell me what the problem is.”

Jongin makes a slash at the air, so forceful he throws his sword halfway across the snowy yard. It slides almost noiselessly against the ground. Taemin watches it go, pretending not to feel the heat of Jongin’s gaze against the side of his face.

“Pick it up,” Taemin instructs. Jongin makes no attempt to move.

“Who have you been with?” Jongin asks him, with all the forced casualty his body can afford.

Taemin doesn’t stammer out the answer. In fact, knowing he has this sway, small as it is, makes his chest swell pridefully. “What does it matter to you?”

And Jongin, so young, so brash, so inexperienced with someone willing to question him, becomes a child being admonished with the red ears to match. “I don’t want to train anymore,” he says quietly, his voice a whisper of snow upon the ground. 

“That’s good, because we’re done for the day.” Here Taemin sheaths his knife in his belt, taking some small comfort in the sound of metal upon leather. At least this is dependable, more so than the response of some man-made-god who can’t decide what he wants from his life.

Jongin still has made no move to pick his sword from the snow. “No, I mean--” He falters. “I mean I don’t want to do this with you anymore. At all. Maybe I can find you another job.”

Taemin stills now, a statue with snowflakes adhering to his eyelashes while he stares, sightless, at the sky. “Why would you want such a thing?”

“Because you aren’t mine,” says Jongin. Like it’s simple. Like it’s practise, and he’s learned it inside and out and is trying it out in reality for the first time. He bites his lip so hard Taemin swears he sees a trickle of blood between his perfect, royal teeth, and despises him for it. What good is it for a spoiled prince to want? “Because you’re sharing your time with other people, and that doesn’t seem like it would be very good for me. I need someone who’s got focus, _Viper_ , and I don’t think that’s something you have.” 

Taemin’s head rings with alarm, sudden and forceful. Has his number come up so soon?

Instead of threatening, though, Jongin’s nose wrinkles up. There is disdain in his eyes that Taemin has seen him use only sparingly, usually for his father or the occasional court petitioner looking to have a case settled that could be done without divine intervention. “I don’t know that I could learn anything from a common whore, either.”

It is meant to lop the extraneous branches from Taemin’s self-esteem, and he knows it all too well. But instead it arouses some fire in his belly that he’s sure no one but Jongin could extinguish. If he had not known himself to be in trouble before, he certainly does now, standing a full dozen paces from Jongin and meeting his eye with the confidence that a common whore might have.

Better to play the hand dealt him, he figures.

“Then take my head,” pronounces Taemin at last, turning away and stalking back into the castle, ignoring the distance in favour of pretending it doesn’t hurt. “It would be simpler than trying to come up with something honourable for a dishonourable, distracted assassin whore to do.”

“I’m not coming back to lessons,” calls Jongin, an afterthought, voice ringing hollow throughout the otherwise empty courtyard. The wind all but carries his declaration away.

“You’ll come back.” Taemin mutters it twice to himself, when the groaning of the castle’s bones welcome him back in, and he can scarcely hear Jongin’s protests before he ever closes the door behind himself. “You have to come back.”

Barred now from Jongin’s insults, his ego, Taemin slumps against the castle wall, and shakes for reasons he cannot, in good conscience, name.


	4. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You shouldn’t be here. There are enough things being said about you and me that it would be safer for me should you not insist on a late-night visit.”
> 
> “What sort of things?” Jongin asks, bland, staring at his nails pointedly. “I mean, I assume _you_ pay attention to...to those sorts of things. I don’t have time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for being patient with the delay -- it seemed to me there were more important matters at hand than my updating a fic ♥

In the days that follow, Taemin hears from the various members of court who’ve decided to stick it out through the coldest days of winter at the castle that the Prince has taken someone else into his bed. It is difficult, upon hearing this news, not to bend his spoon to breaking, if only because he would like to finish his breakfast without the added embarrassment of having to explain why someone might have to let him borrow their cutlery. Taemin, it seems, is learning propriety. Not that he did not know prior; he’s spent his fair share of time in courts like these, listened to the gossip, the tittering of ladies in high hats and low veils. It simply has not come to pass as of yet that it has affected him so deeply.

Their giggling feels like a gaping wound in his chest. He stares down at his doublet, heaves a sigh and tries to wriggle out from beneath the weight of the ball that sits upon his chest, unconscionable and unanswerable. One mistake, made under cover of night, had been one thing; this is something else entirely, something for which he cannot account, something for which he can already see himself hanged in the king’s personal gallery, mounted on a wall like some wild thing killed for sport.

That, at least, brings a smile, an ounce of relief, and he clings to it like a poor man might gold. He would be lying if he didn’t admit to his own gallows humour.

In his nights spent alone, Taemin finds that he recalls the look on his princely subject’s face all too well, the sneer that had drawn his upper lip when he’d pronounced the word ‘whore’, all pretty and gilded in his native tongue. Taemin must admit, when he presses his own thumb into the slit of his cock, that he would not mind hearing it again, albeit in different circumstances.

When he comes over his own hand, his bedsheets, it’s with Jongin’s name on his lips, and his face buried in the silk pillows. If the housekeepers notice they’re changing his linens more often than normal, they say nothing of it to him, though he’s sure he’s ignited more than a few impassioned whispers behind his own back.

Jongin, true to his word, does not re-engage in lessons for a time, and apparently has a sudden taste for governance; he can be found at his father’s side, draped lazily over his own diminutive throne. Taemin already sees the bored look on his face and bites his tongue, bides his time, waits for Jongin to change his mind. Surely he will. Surely fighting is better than listening to ancient merchants quibble over whose stock of lake fish was more bountiful this past season.

Bereft of much to do, Taemin takes to wandering the grounds again, making a few friends, paying visits to a few more. Yukhei is pleased to see him, much to his own chagrin; he hadn’t thought himself to have made that good an impression on anyone. He and his fellows catch Taemin up on what’s going on outside castle grounds, the impending war that’s constantly brewing between this nation and the one just to the western border. It makes his bones ache for something beyond these walls. 

Yukhei is good, if overly affectionate, and offers to drink Taemin under the table one of these nights. Perhaps that might quell the restlessness that still settles within Taemin’s very heart, friendship in place of the sex, of which he’s been sadly devoid.

More nights than not he takes up with Ten, though it’s a span of days between the first time they see one another naked and the next. Instead they use the sprawling bedchamber to which Taemin has been assigned to spar, their excess energy better spent that way. Not that it matters. Not that Ten doesn’t fall into Taemin’s bed a couple times, sweating and disheveled, looking just as much the angel as he did the first time they found one another’s company.

Each time, Taemin wilts under the pressure that Ten digs into his skin, fingertips in bruises that have started to yellow and fade, and each time, he thinks of the look in Jongin’s eyes when the Prince had accused him of having divided focus.

In either case, Taemin walks away with more than his fair share of marks, be it from their sexual escapades or their nightly scuffles. These wounds are not the same, Taemin notes as he checks over each on them in the morning. They do not feel the same when he prods at them. He wonders if he has some affliction that keeps him from taking pleasure in things that he has found joyous before.

Worse yet, he wonders if the Prince is the cause.

The rumours grow stronger, not just about Jongin -- but about Taemin himself. How he fancies the Prince in spite of his lowly status as a known criminal, how he’s been sleeping with half the men and a third of the women in the castle.

He wonders this, too, if Jongin knows what is being said of him. It would stand to reason, after all, he coming to Taemin without cause, laying jealousy at his feet, bare and unashamed.

It is one of the alone nights when he gets his answer, stupidly worded as it may be. He’s reading a book, curled amongst the furs that drape his bed, significant of one of winter’s colder nights. Beneath the blanket he wears only a thin shirt to protect his heart from the chill that goes unabated by the fireplace crackling in the hearth. He is thinking of dallying alone, if only for something to do with his hands, when there comes a knock at his door.

Strange, considering he had not invited anyone to call upon him. He wonders briefly if Yukhei has come to take him up on that offer for drinks and stories and merriment. The stones beneath his bare feet are so cold he nearly trips over himself as his body tries to shrink away from them.

When he answers the door, his fur wrapped around his waist lazily, the Prince is the last person he expects.

“Jongin,” he breathes.

Without waiting for an invitation, Jongin enters the bedchamber, shouldering past Taemin, brash. “Who else is here?” he asks, turning on his heel.

Taemin blinks once, twice, surprise in the slackening of his jaw. He stares Jongin up and down like some sort of apparition. “No one. I’m here alone tonight.”

The straight line of Jongin’s shoulders goes lank, a sudden release of tension letting him hang free of his preconceived notions and prejudices against whomever Taemin decides to invite into his room for an evening. “Good,” he says, a breathy whisper, as if the mere act of asking a question has done something in the way of exerting him.

Taemin’s mind drifts to a place it should not go, not when Jongin is right here in his bedroom.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he says after a long and heavy silence. He ignores Jongin’s presence, the way in which he watches every minute movement of Taemin’s muscles as he draws the furs closer to himself, trying to stave off the chill that he thinks has little to do with the weather. “There are enough things being said about you and me that it would be safer for me should you not insist on a late-night visit.”

“What sort of things?” Jongin asks, bland, staring at his nails pointedly. “I mean, I assume _you_ pay attention to...to those sorts of things. I don’t have time.”

Impatient with the process of learning these games, Taemin rolls his eyes, scoffs. “Why are you here, Prince?” he asks, short, to the point. “Because I am certain you do not intend to lose me my head this evening, just as I’m certain you’ve no intention of losing your reputation.”

“I came to a--” Said Prince cuts himself off. “Reputation?”

“For being untouched. As a god sometimes is, when he is kept out of reach of his worshipers. Tell me why you’re here.” Taemin crosses the cold stone floor again and flops down in his bed, staring up at the cobwebbed ceiling.

“To tell you I’m sorry.”

Just as soon as he’d rested his head, Taemin raises it again. He blinks the surprise from his eyes. “Tell me what?”

“Don’t make me say it again,” groans Jongin, tucking his hands into the pockets of his breeches. “It was hard enough the first time.”

“No, say it again, because I’m not sure you know what the word means, and I want to teach you.” Taemin’s mouth curls into a smirk that he does not feel. “That’s my job, isn’t it? Teaching you things you don’t know?”

“I’m _sorry_ ,” sighs Jongin, defeated. 

“For what?” Taemin leans on his elbow, watches as Jongin starts to pace the floor, his boots flecked with dust. He must have been outside. “Were you trying to practise alone?”

“No,” says Jongin, glancing up, alarm clear and clean in his eyes. “...Yes. What does it matter? I’m sorry for calling you a whore and accusing you of being distracted. You aren’t. You’re the only real teacher I’ve ever had, and I don’t want to go on learning without you. Is that enough? Do you need more?”

Taemin considers this, then nods. “It’ll take more than pathetic eyes and a halfearted apology for me to forgive you, Your Highness,” and he knows the nickname is a jab, but he can’t help himself in taking it. He’s worried his tone might somehow betray the fact that his resolve is melting already. 

“So you know already what it’ll take?” Jongin’s mouth upturns, too, and Taemin’s sure they’re mirror images of one another.

Taemin shrugs the pelt over his shoulder, shivers. Something about that look destroys him. He doesn’t want to admit what it is. Especially not when it’s clear that the Prince has not yet learned his lesson. “Of course I know. What sort of teacher would I be if not?”

Jongin seems to consider this a moment, rocking lightly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “A horrible one,” he admits. “What can I do?”

“Come here.”

He’s never seen such an obedient prince, one who comes to his bedside, genuflects at the foot, tucking his chin atop his folded arms, something innocent in his wide eyes, his slightly-slack mouth. “Tell me what it is. I’ll do anything.”

That, Taemin knows, is a dangerous offer. He must restrain himself, so he does, bottom lip trapped behind his front teeth. “I’m sore after a day of listening to gossipmongers and training with people who are far better fighters than you will ever be.” He pretends to ignore that Jongin’s expression briefly becomes one of great affront. In reality it pleases him more than he might be willing to confess. “I need you to rub my muscles better.”

His conscience mocks him. It asks him if this is what the self-control he’s spent a lifetime sharpening would demand of him. He ignores this, too, same as he does the petulance laid plain on the Prince’s face. “Alright,” he says, slowly, unsurely.

“Come, now.” The shift between them is more comfortable, more like their time spent on the practise grounds, with him the one in power. “You’ve been with some people, I assume. You know how to rid them of their aches and pains. It’d only be a kindness at this point.”

_What do you know of kindness?_ that same conscience asks him. 

Jongin moves closer, round the corner of the bed, kneeling at Taemin’s feet. He takes one aching calf in his hands -- they’re more calloused than Taemin might think them to be, no doubt the result of the knife-sharpening Taemin’s demanded of him since they’ve been together -- and begins to knead it.

Taemin bites his tongue so hard he tastes iron to keep the noise that pushes at the dam of his lips from escaping. _Stupid, stupid, stupid._

Still, it would be positively foolish to deny that Jongin is good at this, that he learns the knots in Taemin’s skin with a delicacy that a brash prince should not know. He works out each in turn, occasionally lifting his gaze to meet Taemin’s. Each time their eyes lock something fierce and burning trills its way up his spine, and he has to make himself focus.

It feels amazing. He releases tension he hadn’t even realised he’d carried, and when Jongin shifts to the other side, he stretches the one that has already been taken care of. “My Prince,” purrs Taemin, unable to help himself, though there are warning bells blaring at the edge of his conscious thought. “You’re too talented. No wonder no one is allowed to touch you, they’d start wars over your hands alone.”

It is the wrong thing to say, because Jongin freezes entirely, his fingertips pressing gently into the taut muscle of Taemin’s calf. “Are you saying you’d like me to touch you more?”

Taemin doesn’t have an answer for that, simply because he is blushing up to the tips of his ears, not so much embarrassed as purely _ashamed_. “I am not saying anything of the sort,” he says stoutly, his bottom lip jutting out. “I am not saying anything at all.”

Jongin makes a soft, amused sound. “Surely you’re joking. I can hear you speaking. I know I’m a fool for coming here, but I’d be even dumber for not listening, don’t you think?”

“If only your enemies could see you now,” sings Taemin under his breath, mockery in the tune. “To see a god bow before you is a sight that very few men get to behold.”

It is with great care that Jongin presses into a particularly large knot, just below the pit of Taemin’s knee. Taemin does not even know that there is a bruise there, probably made by tripping over his own feet in the middle of a spar. A common injury. 

The thing that is not simple to explain is the noise that spills out of Taemin’s gaping mouth, the way his chest arcs forward and his head tips back and, gods of any and all kind forbid, his cock springs to attention. It is a mercy that the fur is heavy enough to hide it, for the most part.

That doesn’t stop it from catching Jongin’s attention. He drags his tongue over his lips, and does not look away, not even for a moment. “Do you like it, teacher?” he asks.

Taemin sits up, crosses his legs, makes a face of pure disdain. “Get out of my bedroom this instant, you cad,” he says, so softly that he cannot begin to convince himself he means it.

Jongin, too, looks unconvinced, but stands to leave regardless. “Our lessons will resume tomorrow, then?” he asks, and Taemin knows that he has failed to teach the Prince anything. It serves him right, letting his loins guide him away from a place of better judgment. “I mean, since I’ve done everything you’ve asked for in your terms of forgiveness.” His smile is dazzling. He does not wait for an answer before sweeping from Taemin’s chambers, his cape trailing behind him.

Taemin stares down at the tented spot beneath his blanket, cursing his cock for a traitor. Of course.

It does not occur to him until much later, when he has blown out the lamp that lights his room and let the fire in the hearth die down to embers, that he realises precisely the depth of the mistake he’s made. But that doesn’t stop him from getting himself off, the memory of Jongin’s fingers burning trails along his skin.

In the morning, he asks the maids about the cobwebs, shame in the way he hangs his head as he wonders, distracted, whether or not Jongin had paid the same attention to his room as he had the night prior. They promise to clear it out, same as they promise to clean his bed for him.

If they laugh behind his back, Taemin chooses to ignore it.

///

The cold winter nights pass, thawing into something a little more bearable, a few more sunbeams cast into his room, the days affording him hours he’s sorely missed. No longer do Taemin’s joints ache with the chill that has settled into them. No longer does he don his heaviest cloak, the feathers tickling at the side of his face in a way that reminds him of long sleeps in insect-infested caves. 

No longer does the prince wear his heaviest outfits to work. In fact, he shows skin beneath his armour when he practises now, the parted collar of his shirt proudly displaying a breathtaking expanse of tan that Taemin pretends not to admire when he’s sure he cannot be seen doing so.

Already, Taemin misses winter and the safety it had promised him.

Practise becomes more constant, four days a week instead of three. Jongin’s skill develops, and with it does his muscle mass. Now, when he stretches in advance of their sessions, Taemin would be blind not to see the way he bulges from beneath the padding, just as he would be deaf to ignore Jongin’s request to the seamstresses to make him a new set of padding. 

Now, whenever he charges Jongin, weapon drawn, ready to deliver a potentially killing blow only to stop short, he finds his mouth going dry with a desire that he’s unleashed upon himself and no one else. There is a thirst that lingers at the back of his throat, one that cannot be accounted for by the change in climate, nor the intensity of their practises. No, ever since the night Jongin had apologised to him, it is all Taemin can occupy himself with. The memory of that massage haunts him both in sleeping and waking hours.

Their afternoons are stretched out, now, the sun lingering behind smatterings of pinked-out clouds. Just as before, Taemin and Jongin dance.

Every time he rises to the occasion, so to speak, Taemin remembers Ten’s words of warning. He recalls the shock on Jongin’s face when he’d realised his game was working. He remembers the siren lure of the guillotine, audible to everyone except himself. He is the only one that runs the opposite direction. The rest of this court -- Prince included, in spite of his incessant flirtation -- seems to want to see him tread water until he falls beneath the surface.

The clang of blades brings him back to himself in the middle of a bout. Good. He is crossing metaphors, spending too much time reading books left to him by an ‘anonymous’ donor. This does not bode well for him, in his own estimation.

They dance as they always have, Jongin feigning left to catch Taemin at his right. He’s getting quicker. That lean muscle ribboned beneath his skin is doing him nothing but favours, both on and off the playing field. Soon he will not even need Taemin.

The thought shudders through Taemin, a lightning bolt that hurts far more than any heavenly blow might.

He falls short of pinning the Prince in place, when the time comes, not able to raise his blade before Jongin spins away, a veritable waltz in his step. It is Taemin being merciful to only himself, unable to bear the notion that he might cause injury the way his student does with such unbridled glee. 

Jongin does not like this, raises his chin with his back to the trunk of an ancient tree. “Don’t play nice with me,” he commands, like his power means something more to Taemin than it actually does. The look in his eyes is distinctly reminiscent of the bedroom. Taemin bites his tongue.

They have not spoken of that night, nor has Taemin had any desire to do so. Every time he so much as thinks of doing so his ears colour and he loses his breath in a way that has little to do with the exertion that Jongin forces him into daily. Jongin, though, smiles at Taemin sometimes, when he thinks he cannot be seen -- like he’s got a secret the likes of which no one can ever know.

Perhaps he does. Perhaps Taemin is in far more danger than he knows, and Jongin is plotting his unravelling even now. With a blade pointed at his throat, the distance between them is too much and not nearly enough.

With the changing season, the ground sprouts shades of green so brilliant that the gemstones in Jongin’s age-old jewelry should be jealous. Taemin watches the grass sway in the gentle springtime breeze, rather than watching his student collect himself. They dance again, and again, and again, until Taemin comes back to himself, until he is overcome with the need simply to _survive_ , rather than get those particular needs met.

Still -- perhaps it is time he thaws with the ground he trods, when he wanders at all. He finds that his lessons with Jongin are more fun when he looks at them as an exercise in self-control. It is better still when he wins the game he’s put before himself.

The gifts keep coming, just as distressing as they had been the first time. Now they are fruits from Taemin’s home, dug up from the stores beneath the castle kitchen. Good, he thinks, taking a dried fig between his teeth to feel it mush upon his tongue, bittersweet. The less evidence left behind the better. He can see, in his mind’s eye, the Prince asking the cooks questions about faraway lands, the things they eat upon the turning of the season when the mood is festive and the sun has at last reached back into the sky. He can picture perfectly the way in which Jongin focuses on every answer, making notes in his mind, thoughtful as he is.

The thought should fill him with dread. Instead, he is endeared.

Weeks pass this way. Taemin hears the promise of a social event to come. More courtiers pouring in than ever, all ready to pay their tribute to the God King and his belovèd son. Many people flock to a tiny chapel in the eastern sector, offering their prayers and their wishes for a bountiful spring.

After all, pleasing a god is the most important thing low-ranking royals can do for their subjects. It ensures them safety in a time when so much is uncertain. This is the best assurance they can have.

When attending their lessons, Jongin shows up with sagging shoulders, the weight of the world bearing down on them. It appears the boons asked of him when he sits alongside his father at court are simply too numerous for him to bear.

It is merciful to give the Prince someone to talk to, thinks Taemin as he lectures on knowing your exits, on training your ears to your surroundings. It is more merciful still to ignore the things about which your conversational partner does not want to share. Taemin pauses now, more than ever, trying to find the right words to thank Jongin for his many gifts.

None come. Jongin does not acknowledge them, but there seems to be hope in his eyes.

Taemin, for his part, pretends that he does not see a god bleed. If anyone else sees it, passing overhead, they do not say. Taemin does not hear whisper of it, though he keeps his ear to every wall now -- remnant paranoia that he’s earned, that the court would be happy to reinforce if they had the chance. In these times, they talk about the renewal of life, and the fact that the Prince’s last lover has been sent home for dereliction of duty. The greying God King had spat and foamed his wicked illness all over the young courtier’s face in screaming him cursèd, left him wrinkled and rankled and worse for wear all around. 

Not that the Prince hadn’t done the same, under cover of night. Not that the Prince should face any consequences. After all, every god takes tribute of some sort.

Taemin wonders, briefly, as he takes note of the rumours, whether or not that boy Taemin had witnessed the Prince chatting up -- Mark, his name had been, a lovely young thing just this side of his first summer as a man -- will ever be permitted a return. If he should keep his head whenever he gets where he’s been told to go. 

Moreover, he wonders if perhaps he himself should simply be banished for his crimes against the crown. If he should get so lucky, he wonders what he might do. The thought of home lingers in his mind, never expressed but always felt.

But there is the seed of doubt in his heart. He does not chance it, not even when the Prince draws his blood, not even when it splatters the pristine white of the clothing he wears beneath his armour. 

At night, he still dreams of the Prince splayed beneath him, palms spread upon his chest to feel the beating of his heart. It is the cover of twilight that keeps his secrets better than he ever could as he digs his fingertips into bruises that have greened with every exercise he and his Prince do.

Taemin knows that he will go mad with want, but he cannot stop teasing at those marks. Save being with the Prince himself, they are the only thing that get the job done.

///

In his time of quietude, Taemin takes advice given him by Ten and visits the shrine tucked into the far corner of the castle. The path is a well-worn, winding one, without all the trappings and beauty that the rest of the fortress displays to all its guests. No, here the stone is set to crumble any day now, and the voices of prayers are louder than any gossip he’s ever heard exchanged in the dining halls. There is an undercurrent of sound here -- rushing water, the river around the castle itself threatening to converge upon the chapel.

Taemin hears the singing, mingled with the movement of water. He takes a deep breath, steels himself against whatever disaster a nonbeliever might find upon entering a place where a faith he doesn’t honour makes its home.

The chapel is a simple room: a circular chamber, its walls lined with statues of varying sizes. Kings past, he knows. It would make sense no other way. He ducks behind one near the arched entryway, taking in the sight before him, the two enormous statues in the center of the room. One is of the King, albeit a much younger version of him. The other is of Jongin, just a few years shy of where he must be now, perched on his knees and lifting a dove with outstretched wings skyward.

It should not surprise him that the chapel floor is covered in bodies paying their devotions to the gods that have governed this nation since the dawn of time. From what Ten has told him, there is always someone there offering their prayers, needing some favour, some divine gift that no one else could give. 

It does, however, surprise him that Jongin is there, surrounded by hatted men in pristine gold-and-cream robes. Their tails drag on the floor; the sound runs with that of the moat’s movement, and Taemin is filled with the sense that something important is near to collapsing.

_It must be the first day of Spring,_ he thinks as he sweeps further into the shadows afforded him at the back of the cathedral, the ancestors providing him protection he doesn’t deserve as a nonbeliever.

Jongin stands, regal, shoulders squared, in the circle made round the altar in his name. He looks upon the faces of each and every one of his worshipers in turn, and gives them the most serene smile Taemin thinks he’s ever seen.

They scrabble for an inch of his skin to touch, some beautiful part of him to claim as their own. His robe is open, he only barely clothed at the waist, a string of jewels leading from the column of his neck all the way down to his navel only to wrap around his hips. The gems catch in the dim candlelight, the glint of them almost doing enough to catch Taemin’s eye, drag his decidedly lascivious gaze from the cut of the Prince’s hips.

He darts the tip of his tongue along the seam of his lips, finding himself quite parched.

The Prince closes his eyes as his holy men drag oiled fingertips down the breadth of his chest, along the swell of his throat, and against the soft spot just behind his ears. Taemin watches the steadying rise and fall of his chest, something he had coached Jongin through many times so as to keep his head in a fight. He admires the way in which he moves where he’s bid, the graceful gait he did not have when first they met. The Prince sings the song and the people give the words back to him, the call and response almost magical. 

Taemin reflects upon the old gods, the ones upon whom he was raised. He cannot decide whether he likes this better than their rituals, the howling, the bloodletting, the smoke and chanting of priestesses whose eyes rolled back in their heads at the slightest provocation.

It is a sad sight that Taemin thinks of rebuking the gods that raised him. It is worse still that he is thinking of joining those clambering fools who wither under Jongin’s slightest acknowledgment. That he considers what it might feel like to genuflect at Jongin’s feet, and what sort of favour it might earn him. He wants the warm glance of honeyed eyes that speak of a bedroom neither of them can reach, of a worship not fit for the eyes of others.

He lingers, even when they clutch at the hem of his garment with their trembling fingers, even when they speak his name with their crooked tongues and their blackened teeth. The priests ask for his blessing, and Taemin wishes only that he had the gall to do the same.

Do they not know that Jongin is a man? He is forced to wonder, thinking of the sight of blood upon the Prince’s skin. He pushes away the idea that he would have cleaned it himself if only given the chance.

Still, when at last the ceremony ends, and Jongin has been whisked away to the chamber to be bathed and pampered appropriately so that he might look favourably upon their pleas, Taemin stays rooted to the spot. He wonders if perhaps he might swear fealty to a crown in which he has no stake: not a god, but a kingdom, a ruler for whom he would do bidding, be at their beck and call, slay their enemies and bring back heads to mount on pikes.

For Jongin, he muses, he might just be able to do that.

Though Taemin doesn’t believe in the singular Creator, or His Divine Bloodline, he does believe in the everyday things -- in fate, in balance, in having something worth fighting for. And when he closes his eyes and still sees the image of Jongin, rivulets of purified oil dripping from his skin. He knows that he could, at the very least, swear on that.

A troublesome thought.

When he falls asleep that night, he dreams of being the hand anointing Jongin’s bare skin. Upon waking, he realises the sort of trouble he’s in. Though he has not recently demonstrated a strong sense of self-preservation, a cold chill runs through him as he swears he hears the Fox calling his name, beckoning him to a home he’s never had.

He breathes in, calms himself, tapping into the patience of a man who is waiting to die.

In the back of the cathedral, he watches Jongin blow out the candles lighting the chapel one by one, until the pair of them are alone, at opposite ends of the room, plunged into darkness. If Jongin knows he is there, he says nothing, and Taemin thanks the god for his mercy.

///

Practise is not going well. He’s far from a professional teacher, but the fact that his student seems to be learning so little these days is a discouragement. Jongin appears distracted, every swing of his blade slow, every step he makes one in the wrong direction, every move honeyed as his eyes linger anywhere but on the sharp form of his instructor.

Almost like he doesn’t want to play anymore.

They dance, a waltz made not for the fields of battle but the courtier’s ballroom floor. Taemin bites his tongue to hide his frustration, that saint’s patience wearing thin quickly on a tepid day of work. He takes a step forward, and Jongin steps to the left, the blade at his hip only just drawn. It gleams now, sharper than ever, catching in the grey sunlight filtering into their courtyard. Taemin draws two knives, crosses them at Jongin’s throat, poised just right to slit him right through.

“Again,” demands Taemin, an impending typhoon waiting to blow in.

Jongin brushes the hair from his forehead with his gloved hand, and rolls his shoulders. Taemin does not miss the surprise in his eyes at being caught.

They go on like this, one misstep after another, little nicks and cuts left in the fine angles of Jongin’s face. He does not seem to notice, not even when the slow trickle of blood meanders its way along his jaw. Taemin tucks away thoughts of wiping it off, and buries entirely those of mapping its path with the flat of his tongue. The lesson brings him focus, and he does not have room for ideas that will lose him his head today. Instead he leaves more marks, a dagger hilt to a padded side, a kick to the shin to knock the Prince’s feet out from beneath him.

Jongin whines when he loses again, again, again. When Taemin wounds him, he buckles at the knees, clutches at his stomach. Taemin rolls his eyes and stoops. He takes Jongin’s face in one hand, the warm leather hilt of his knife pressed into the hinge of his jaw. “Are you alright?” he asks, unfailingly, and to his chagrin he means it.

Jongin merely shrugs him off, climbs to his feet, gets into the stance he’d learned so well not so long ago. He wants to fight, though whether it’s Taemin that’s the object of his violence or not isn’t clear. Not right now, not when the line of his shoulders is so heavy and his gaze so dispassionate.

It is late in the afternoon when the dusky clouds of a storm roll in, blocking out the sickly sun that frames Jongin in his best light. Now that the wan light no longer catches him for the sun god as whom he is paraded, he can be seen for who he really is: a man, tired, languishing in his own exhaustion rather than using that frustration for good. Taemin would hate to miss out, but he’s grateful for the shadow cast over them, for the break in the breathlessness that seems to take him whenever he’s close to Jongin, when his thoughts can’t be controlled.

In the distance, thunder snaps against the blackening sky, and Taemin nearly jumps out of his skin.

“What’s wrong?” asks Jongin.

He says nothing and sheaths his knife, dragging the back of his wrist against the solemn curve of his own mouth. “What’s bothering you, Your Highness?” The title is a weak jab. 

Jongin does not answer for a long while and raises his blade to the dark sky. Instead he appears to study the contrast of its shine against the downpour threatening their heads. Finally, he speaks, and he sounds haggard beyond his years. “I do not want to be a king, someday,” he says, like that means anything at all to Taemin, or to anyone else.

“Why do you say that?” Taemin hedges closer, shoulders drawn up to his ears. There’s sheepishness in his tone now, the sort that he might never have displayed before the Prince had laid hands upon him.

“Because then I cannot have the things I want.” He lowers his blade at last, a flinch ready in the set of his eyes, indicative of the ache in his upper arm, his shoulder, his heart. His eyes meet Taemin’s for far too long, until the feeling building beneath Taemin’s skin is one of mistrust, of _danger_.

The sky opens up, and pours down its anger and retribution upon their heads, as if the heavens’ displeasure had not been clear in the way they dance around their true intentions. 

“Fuck,” says Jongin, and despite the the wet crack of thunder that rings out overhead, he’s loud enough that anyone patrolling the halls overhead might hear. The look on his face says that he does not care; he’s still pinning Taemin to his spot with the heat of a gaze that does all the talking for him.

His armour is still padding. He soaks through more quickly than Taemin does in his leathers, and when he pulls away his expression turns dejected, something he doesn’t bother to hide when he lifts his head to meet Taemin’s eye. His long hair plasters to his face and the side of his neck. For the second time he does not look like the god the priests say he is; he looks like a man. It is so, so difficult to see him as anything more than the brat Taemin has learned him to be, the baby who cares too much even when it suits him better to care at all, who gives good massages and doesn’t take too much and rules his people with a just hand.

In this moment, he looks like Jongin. Just a person.

“Can we quit for the day?” Jongin asks, in a voice so small and pathetic that Taemin would be positively cruel to deny him. So they toddle inside, Jongin weighted down by his false armour, the downpour catching in the culver between his collarbones.

Even when they are inside and that water no longer gathers, Taemin thinks of drinking wine from that divine divide. He shakes his head the way a dog might to rid the water from its ears. _Bad boy._

Inside it is unseasonably cool and reminiscent of the winter, of when lighting the hearth had not yet been a faux pas. They rack their weapons, and Jongin is shaking from the cold that must have settled through his fancy silks, his stupid pads. His skin has paled a fraction, and it is not a look that suits him, though the gooseflesh that rises upon his nape is a sight Taemin could maybe admit aloud he’s pleased to see. “Help me,” he asks, trying to tug at the tie at the back of his neck, only to have it tangle in his hair. “Please?”

And again, Taemin would be hateful to deny him. He positions himself behind Jongin, works at each and every tie along the length of his spine, exposing the sodden silk doublet beneath. “There,” he says softly, when his task is done and he can at last breathe without thinking of his fingers trawling the skin visible through Jongin’s clothes.

Jongin, wicked as ever, doesn’t move save for a shift of his hips, a footing that Taemin had taught him not a week prior. He presses the curve of his buttocks against Taemin’s hips, clumsily.

“Oops,” he says, leaving no room for doubt that it is intentional on his part, what he’s doing. 

Taemin clears his throat noisily, starts to remove his own armour, piece by piece, head low so that Jongin does not get the pleasure of seeing the fire ignited in his eyes. “Hang it up when you’re done, would you?” He drapes his own armour along the racks, watching intently the way the puddles gather at the ends of each hem. “I’d hate for this fine equipment to mold.”

The best thing he can do for himself is ignore it while his loins plot his personal ruin. Not that Jongin lets himself be ignored.

“Let me help you,” he asks, shuffling closer, reaching out his arms as if to wrap Taemin in an embrace. Taemin thinks of the chapel, and the gleaming edge of a headsman's ax in full sunshine, and the patient way in which Jongin had kneaded his perfect fingertips into the aching muscle of Taemin’s calf. He jolts away from the promise of assistance.

“Don’t _fucking_ touch me,” Taemin spits, fright extinguishing whatever fire his belly had lit, the force of pure emotion knocking him further out of Jongin’s reach. His face colours vivid crimson, and the heat combined with the condensation still lingering on his skin makes him think perhaps he should steam. He raises his heavy head, tries to exude a piteousness that will keep him safe. “Please. You have to understand that I don’t quite feel like dying or, worse yet, living as an exile.”

_Please don’t make me leave you._ It goes unspoken. Taemin does not know that Jongin would understand his plight -- and why should he? No one would dare raise their weapon to a prince, a king, a _god_.

Jongin’s lower lip quivers, and that is enough to shame Taemin into hiding his burning face in his hands.

When he looks up at last, the room is devoid of another presence. He sinks to his knees, digs into the cobbles, anguish washing over him in waves so heavy he’s sure he might drown. His armour is the only thing that protects him when he collapses to the stone floor beneath him, belly-down like a dog waiting to be thrown out into the streets.

If he whispers Jongin’s name, no one, least of all himself, could blame him for it.


	5. 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’ll get you socialised yet,” Ten promises, and Taemin believes him, against his better wishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY THERE ARE SEXY BITS IN HERE. please take note of the tags (which i have definitely updated) in case you are Concerned or simply Do Not Wish To Consume The Sexy Bits

“You’re going to the ball, aren’t you?” asks Ten over drinks, a few short days after Taemin had pushed Jongin away with everything he had. He’s exhausted everything else tonight, including endless measures of flirtation to which Taemin has no response. Taemin knows he’s horrible company, but at this he perks up enough that Ten might stil retain hope. “It’s the social event of the season. Everyone in their right mind -- and quite a few who aren’t -- show up trying to get a dance with the prince.”

Taemin sips contemplatively at his flowery drink. “I don’t like balls,” he says under his breath, and for the first time tonight cracks a ghost of a smile when Ten snorts into his own flagon.

“That sounds like a lie if I’ve ever heard you tell one.” He nudges Taemin with his shoulder, and gives him a look of imploration, as if it would be too much to simply _invite_ him to the ball. “What? All I’m saying is, if you want to--” And here he glances around, afraid not of the blasphemy he’s about to commit but rather those who’d take offense to it, “If you want to get in with your student, that would probably be the best time to do it.”

Taemin’s smile, short-lived, melts into a scowl upon the implication. “What, pray tell, do you mean by that?” he asks, stony. “I am merely a teacher.”

“A teacher who’s had the Prince visit his bedchambers. What, you thought I wouldn’t find out?” Ten has the nerve to look affronted and turns back to his drink with a sniff. “I know more than you will ever understand. The benefit of having more than one person to get down to grit with, I suppose.” The last part he sings, and Taemin frowns even harder. “Alright, grumpy, that’s fine. Have it your way. But I, for one, would like to know if those fancy fighting feet of yours can do more than peg a man to a tree.”

Taemin begrudgingly admires Ten’s spirit, his dedication, even if that dedication is to embarrassing Taemin at every possible turn. Still, he has to think about this -- about what it might do to him, should his affections pour from his eyes as they are wont to do.

Ten’s knee rests against his under the table, warm, a comforting heft against his own slim frame. He can’t say he’s been eating much lately, too worried about whether a particular meal will be his last.

Finally, he relents. “What should I wear?”

Ten makes the most gleeful noise and claps Taemin’s shoulder fondly. “I’ll work it out, don’t you worry about a thing, my lovely little Viper!”

Recoiling from the nickname, Taemin asks, “Where did you hear it was alright to call me that?”

The smile he receives in return is gleaming, too smug by far. “I was the one who told the Prince, of course. You think we just go out looking for assassins without knowing anything about them?” It’s distracted, that response -- one of Ten’s many flings must have caught his eye from across the tavern. “I’ll be back, but only in a bit, hm? Stay here and wait for me and I’ll walk you back to your chambers.”

Now is Taemin’s turn to snort into his wine. It would be unkind to hate his only friend here, but at this moment, Taemin must. After all he’ll spend the rest of the evening thinking far too long and hard about what luxury Ten has in sleeping with whomever he likes.

That, too, is a dangerous thought, one that Taemin drowns with his drink. He orders two more, and when the serving girl gives him a look of question, he shrugs. “He’ll be back in just a moment,” he half-lies, gesturing to the spot where Ten had just sat. “It’s for him.”

She narrows her eyes, but bustles back into the kitchen anyway. 

When he sits alone with his two drinks, Taemin ignores her continued scrutiny and, when she isn’t looking, drains both drinks alone.

///

The night of the ball is the first clear one in weeks. The torrent of new spring has given the farmers and fieldworkers the blessing they needed. The air is cool, damp, a bit heavy for breathing in. The moon peeks in through the high windows of the ballroom, adding ambience. It is a silver lining to the beauty of various high-ranking officials and courtiers in their best dress. 

It looks favourably on Taemin who, in his blacks, is an odd man out. He pretends not to notice the eyes on him constantly, the way those same courtiers seem to pass some judgment on him without being courteous enough to tell him.

It’s fine, he tells himself. He does not need to be their sort of person this evening.

Taemin does not want to be here, a fact he has made clear with his one friend, who’d practically dragged him by the tongue to make sure he’d get here. It’s a good thing he’s here as someone’s sort-of date rather than of his own accord; he knows himself too well not to believe he’d leave at the first opportunity.

At the head of the feasting table sit the King and the Prince. They both raise eloquent toasts to their guests, their kingdom, their good fortune, the blessings that the upcoming year will bring, not only to the celestial court and its many members, but to the country at large. Jongin seems to be speaking to someone in particular, but from this far down the banquet table, Taemin can do a fairly convincing job of believing it couldn’t be him.

Tonight, at the height of the season’s beginning, Jongin is resplendent. His usual circlet has been replaced by a golden crown that perches atop his head, adorned with rubies that work prettily with his skin. This, paired with the traditional garb of high-ranking military officers in a shade of green that speaks to the season, makes him look somehow… _large_. More imposing. He certainly has come a long way from the scrawny thing to which Taemin had been assigned a number of months ago, to say nothing of the slit down the front of his one-piece jacket, exposing his breastbone and the muscles he’s developed through their time together.

Taemin nearly swallows his tongue in his haste to finish the glass of wine before him, lest he say or do or _think_ anything in a betrayal of his better interests.

The night goes on without much notice of Jongin as he mills amidst his father’s guests. They are all party to a feast at which Taemin eats next to nothing. He drinks casually at first, takes in the long tables laden heavy with foods the names of which he doesn’t know. Occasionally he’ll pick at a piece of fruit or some meat that looks delicious but smells horrible. What are the spices in this hellish nation? he wonders, wrinkling his nose. Another is some forest morel swimming in butter, and he samples this, too. This is delightful. He nearly finishes the entire tiny serving dish full of them before catching himself and pushing the bowl away.

Ten keeps him company for a while, the two of them trading jokes the way they might trade drinks, or jabs, or kisses were they anywhere else. “It’s nice to have you here,” Taemin confesses, when his cheeks are rosy with drink and he’s lost all inhibition. “You’re one of the only friends I have in this place.” He doesn’t add that Ten might very well be the only friend he’s _ever_ had, though it’s something he contemplates, when the night hangs high and he can’t sleep. Instead he shifts that he might rest his cheek on Ten’s shoulder, whine too loud about how _bony_ Ten is.

“Whose fault is that?” Ten teases back, reaching beneath the table to prod Taemin’s stomach through his custom-made finery, fingertip catching in the golden X slashed across his chest. “You’re the one who never does anything except spend time with your Prince and go out drinking with me.”

There is someone watching them, Taemin knows; he can feel the heat of an unnamed stare, and though he has his guesses as to who it might be, he does not seek out that attention. Instead he chooses to ignore it in favour of spending time with the only person here who could but wouldn’t hurt him.

The guard, who have come to know Taemin at least a little better than the permanent members of the court, pass by and exchange pleasantries. Taemin bows his head at each of them, wishes them a pleasant evening, but when they’re gone he finds himself leaning harder and harder upon Ten’s guidance. He doesn’t know the rules of talking to these people, doesn’t know who does what or goes where. It’s a shortcoming on his part, made worse by the wine coursing through him.

“We’ll get you socialised yet,” Ten promises, and Taemin believes him, against his better wishes.

Eventually, though, Ten is distracted by some ‘friends’ -- bedroom companions, Taemin assumes, though he doesn’t ask for clarification -- and Taemin is left to his own devices. In swift time the feast ends, and the party moves from the long tables to the dance floor, a tittering of people gathered round to watch the lines form, the partners shape up.

Jongin does not get to dance quite yet, Taemin notes, watching from the corner, waiting near the door for whenever Ten decides to return. Or at least that’s the excuse he gives himself, his heart aching for escape. There are, after all, too many bodies here for him to feel safe. In truth, he is watching the Prince as he fields his many charmers for the evening. 

He thinks of the many hands on Jongin’s chest, his waist, his slender wrists, and Taemin is ill in a way that starts in the pit of his stomach, though he knows too well he cannot blame this on the drink.

He should have expected, from his previous experience watching others fawn over Jongin at length, that the wine pouring freely from various servants’ jugs wouldn’t be enough to quell his jealousy. Taemin, however, had put aside his expectations at his friend’s pleading. Stupid, he thinks, lingering at the back of the room while some fluttering foreign dignitary dusts his lips over one of Jongin’s many ornate rings, the blue stone visibly misted over with his slavering breath. 

Taemin loathes many things, but most of all the Prince’s obligations, his manners and diplomacy, the people to whom he must constantly ingratiate himself in the name of relations. The man with the weak chin looks apt to faint under all this attention, and for a bitter moment Taemin wishes he would.

At the head of the room, upon his raised throne, sits the King, who looks greyer by the day. His paunch is only just contained by the belt he wears round his waist. He watches his son the same way Taemin does, though surely with differing intention. The future of his kingdom’s relations rests on how well the Prince is able to flirt his way into and out of sticky situations, after all. Taemin, for one, wishes the man would drop dead, that the Prince could do whatever he pleases with his bedchambers.

But then, that’s too hopeful a thought, isn’t it?

Taemin puts the thought that Ten has abandoned him out of his mind, finishes one goblet, deposits it on a tray that wanders by on a server’s head. From a different tray he plucks another glass, drains it with the same expediency. When he glances back up at the ballroom floor, he catches sight of Jongin staring at him, those amber eyes fixed on him.

His heart stops, and he swallows thickly around the lump in his throat. He has never seen someone so beautiful, so regal. They haven’t spoken since their argument after their last lesson. Apparently Jongin has been far too busy with preparation for the ball and blessing some two-toothed farmers with a bountiful planting season to come to any more or, at least, make excuses as to why he couldn’t.

His gilded pauldrons move when Jongin does. Taemin watches them, the tiny gemstones at the end of each golden rope, rather than the broad expanse of his back, if only because it’d be improbable to imagine his nails buried into too-pretty twine.

Early in the evening, Jongin makes a first approach, glittering and gorgeous under the light of far too much fire. He can see that dressing in all black makes him stand out amongst the vibrant hues of the lords and ladies that are his company for tonight. 

“May I dance with you tonight?” asks Jongin, all mannerly, the opposite of the Prince he’s come to know. The very corner of his mouth quirks up like he knows something he’s not saying. Taemin, for a moment, hates everything that Jongin is, everything he’s been raised to be.

Taemin gives the Prince a look, and knowing what he knows, declines politely, a soft “no” on his lips. Jongin does his best not to look stricken, but it’s a poor attempt, he being too soft, too spoiled, too _sweet_ to take rejection well.

The musicians strike up a lively tune, heavy on the fiddling, and everyone surrounding the floor cheers, throwing up their hands as the lines of partners form once more. It’s so distracting that Taemin’s almost able to forget that Jongin is likely to be spoken for this evening.

Still, he watches. There’s an elegance to Jongin’s movements that Taemin finds surprises him, to say nothing of his fighting. He thinks of the value he’d assigned to the clumsy man Jongin had once been. He tries to connect that to the swaying movement of hips, the gentle way he wraps his arm around his partner’s waist and the care with which he watches the short train of her dress.

Almost as if he’s learned something from their lessons. 

Whether or not it’s applicable to what Taemin’s tried to teach him is neither here nor there. At this moment precisely, watching Jongin glide effortlessly across the ballroom floor, cheered on by whosoever thinks it appropriate to con their way into the good graces of a god, Taemin wishes he felt up to dancing.

One song melts into another, and another, and another. Taemin stops drinking just to keep the room from spinning out beneath him. He’d so hate to let the heat of his body overwhelm him and turning him into some faint maiden in need of assistance. He looks out for Ten, who has yet to return from the quavering throes of the throng of bodies, though Taemin has since seen that friend -- the same one he met the first night they drank together within the castle’s bounds. He avoids Jongin’s eyes, though they seem to follow him wherever he goes in the ballroom, a shadow in the highest sunshine. 

In time Yukhei finds him, asks him for a dance, and Taemin is just sober enough to oblige his friend, albeit with a gracious smile and a hung head, humility the stronger of his traits when he’s in his cups. They manage to mangle a routine with plenty of footwork; at the end Taemin must admit he’s out of breath, and that he can hear the snickers of his mockers from the crowd.

He glances over his shoulder to determine the source, perhaps goodnaturedly plot some murder, only to find that the Prince is there with a hand extended. “May I have this dance?” he asks, bold as one could please, and those bells of warning toll in Taemin’s head once more.

“You may not,” mutters Taemin, stealing across the ballroom floor. The crowd parts for his exit. The King watches him; he can feel the heat and weight of that gaze at the back of his neck. Far be it from him to care when his head is on the line. 

He skulks back into the shadows, and as if he’s been summoned, Ten materialises beside him, a wicked grin painting his face. “You didn’t dance with your prince,” he teases, and his face and ears are red, though whether that’s the sex he’s been having in some gallery in the east wing or the drink they’ve all been having, Taemin doesn’t care to discern. “Why not, love? What’s wrong? He asked you for it, it would have been safe.”

Taemin spares a glance down, then says, “Your breeches are unlaced.” He pauses, checks the knife at his waist, a comfort ritual. “It’s unbecoming.”

“Oh, because I’ve been coming!” And here Ten makes this shrill little noise of delight that sets a chill up the column of Taemin’s spine. “You’re funny, you know.” He leans his upper body against Taemin’s, fits an arm around his waist, stands on his toes without cause to whisper in Taemin’s ear. “You know he says he loves you, don’t you? That he thinks about you all the time?”

“What?” Taemin laughs, a dry thing, doesn’t look down at his friend, eyes fixed on the incessant movement of dancers upon the jade-and-marble floor. “That brat couldn’t love anything if he tried. Himself aside, of course.” But as soon as it’s out of his mouth, the taste of it is wrong.

“Sure,” says Ten, dubious, tugging at the laces of his breeches at last, trying to get himself presentable. “Anyway, I’m glad you came. Even if you aren’t.”

“Who said I wasn’t?”

Just as quick as he’d come, Ten is gone. Taemin wonders at the fair folk in him, to flit in and out of existence the way he does. It’d be useful for battle, if Ten found espionage distasteful.

There’s a hush over the ballroom, one that must have settled in while he and Ten were talking. The Prince is nowhere to be seen, and though the revelry continues, it’s subdued. Their god is no longer among them bringing them the safety, security, and joy he might usually.

Taemin wishes, just for a moment, that he could get Jongin alone. But he knows too well what his intentions might be in doing so, and as such he joins the dances, now it’s safe to do so.

Above him, the candelabras give off a wiggly sort of light, and it casts his various dance partners in the ugliest visages, the lot of them. His stomach is aching, now, probably those mushrooms he’d scarfed down in his haste to keep from getting too inebriated. The movement, he knows, isn’t helping, but the dancing feels _good_ in a way that Taemin hasn’t allowed himself to feel in so long he can’t say.

It should not shock him that Jongin cuts in on one of his dances, but it does. One moment he’s swinging his partner halfway across the floor and the next, like some sort of dream, he’s catching Jongin in his arms.

Jongin dusts a fingertip along the line of Taemin’s jaw and tilts his head up. “When will you stop running from me, teacher?” he asks, breathless. He’s something to be beheld, up close, and though Taemin hadn’t noticed it before, his chest is painted in gold, the same patterns in which he’d been oiled just a few short days ago. There is a dab of the paint in the dead center of his forehead, smeared by a thumb or a brush. Taemin does not know, not that he would care either way, not that he would envy the thumb or brush or grateful courtier fortunate enough to kiss the marking from Jongin’s forehead. 

Right now he is caught in the embrace of the second strongest arms in the room, and he cannot say that he does not want it. Not when Jongin peers down his nose in Taemin’s direction, and flutters his lashes so prettily that Taemin would swear his loyalty right here, in front of king and courtier.

Their bodies press together in a way that can only be described as sinful, and Taemin curses his traitor body when his cock stirs to life even from beneath the thick layers of his blacks. Jongin notices, he has to, because he gives a subtle roll of his hips in response. He smirks and leans in close enough that he might kiss Taemin, should there not be so many prying eyes around.

“Have you thought much of me touching you?” he asks. Taemin is forced to admire his boldness.

“I have thought of nothing else,” Taemin answers, unable to lie when his tongue is so loose, from the drinking, from the intoxicating sensation of Jongin’s bare hand sliding down the soft inner of his wrist to feel his pulse. “Should I have put in a prayer to you, Your Highness, that I should be absolved of my sin?”

Jongin does that thing with his hips a second time, and though it is just a dance, when Taemin spins away the only prayer he can think to make is that his body doesn’t betray him again.

They meet again, hands joined, but this part of the dance is not the licentious one, hips on hips and chest to chest. Taemin is thankful, but only long enough that Jongin can take his hand and press it to the pulse in his own neck.

His heart is racing too, the pulse beating beneath his skin a rabbit caught in a trap. Funny, considering.

It can’t be the dancing; Jongin has only just rejoined the floor. Taemin’s eyes go wide, and he sees for the first time the truth that has been told to him the entire duration of his stay. So too does his heartbeat quicken, and he sucks in a deep breath and spins Jongin again, away from him, rejoins him across the floor.

They finish the dance only a few measures later, and Taemin does his best to restrain himself, slip out of Jongin’s embrace rather than pushing him away, lest he be taken for some religious traitor. He ducks into the shadows a last time, finding the tunnel that leads to the cathedral, intent upon taking some air rather than ending up in the chapel when he realised the cruelty of fate not too long ago.

It would be remiss of him not to hear the footsteps that trail behind his own, but Taemin can’t bring himself to care if one of his acquaintances saw that little show that Jongin intentionally put on for everyone. Should he want to keep his head…

Well, he must keep his head about him.

It’s why, when he reaches the altar at the front of the chapel, he sinks to his knees, staring up at the bronzed likeness of Jongin’s father, an enormous thing that speaks none to the man who’s been watching him too carefully all night.

“Why would you let me live only to kill me?” he asks the statue in a whisper.

The clouds part beyond the high windows of the chapel. The moon shines down directly into his eyes. If this is an answer, some fated word, Taemin dislikes it so greatly that the acid at the back of his throat threatens to rebel against him.

Sobered by his own weakness, he gathers himself, stands, noting the softness of practised steps in perfect time with the sweeping of the cape he has donned for the evening. It is with a practised swiftness that he draws his knife upon turning, only to find that it is pointed at the Prince’s bejeweled throat, the tip of it grazing the gold collar fitted perfectly to his skin.

“Are you that angry with me?” jokes Jongin, albeit weakly. He holds up his hands in surrender, high enough that he might grab onto the jewel-encrusted horns of his own cape, draw it off his body and sweep it over Taemin’s. His smile is watery, to match the hurt in his eyes.

Taemin does not drop his knife. “I am angry with myself before I could ever be angry with you,” he admits, voice shaking, hands a-tremble. He is a poorer assassin now than he’s ever been. He tips his head, gazes up into the Prince’s face, bottom lip caught between his teeth as he looks upon the pitiable sight of a man who is prepared to lay down his life for someone he does not truly know. “Do you not understand what could happen to me, if I let this happen? Has no one explained to you where your lovers go when you discard them?”

And Jongin, for once in his life, does not have an answer. Instead he looks away, guilty.

Taemin snorts, a harsh sound. “I didn’t think so.” He goes to sheath his knife, but something stops him. Some sound that Jongin makes, a sigh muddled by a sob. “Oh, don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault you don’t know anything about what other people have to live with, day in and day out.”

Jongin’s still looking at him, speechless. His mouth opens, then closes, then closes again. His brow furrows as he tries to parse it out.

It is clear he has nothing with which to smooth this over.

So instead, he surges forward, takes Taemin’s face in his hands. It is here that Taemin is forced to drop his weapon; it clatters to the ground, a hollow, empty noise. Taemin’s resolve falls with it when he sees the softness in Jongin’s eyes.

“I know,” Jongin says, and here in this place it is a reverent whisper that echoes even when the high ceilings do not seem reachable. “And I would die a thousand times for you, assassin, were I permitted to do so.”

Taemin glances around, tries to ground himself, the dull glow of the statues in the pale moon’s light catching his eye. “And what about them? What about all this? You can’t become king if you die for me, you know.”

“You know that wanted to be a king,” says Jongin. “Especially not now. Not if it means keeping away from you.” He pauses, hesitation clear in his eyes. “Please let me kiss you. I’ve been thinking of it all night, ever since I watched you walk in with that scowl upon your face.”

In response, Taemin surges forward and captures the heat of Jongin’s mouth with his own.

Should the idol gods surrounding them have judgment, he finds he cares very little. Instead he favours the way Jongin’s mouth parts beneath the prodding of Taemin’s insistent tongue. He kisses Jongin as if to tell him he has awaited this, that he’s fantasised into existence every ridge of the roof of Jongin’s mouth, as if he’d simply dreamed and brought this man, this god, into being for nothing save his own pleasure. When he catches the tip of his tongue on a canine, he wants to taste iron.

His fingers tangle in the hem of the wrap that winds itself around Jongin’s torso, and he knows he’s every bit the worshiper, grateful to tears for even a glance, let alone a chance to touch, to feel divinity coursing in veins, under skin. He finds his skin burning wherever Jongin’s own caress comes in contact, that the soft spot at the crook of his elbow aches for more blood, that his head spins when he takes a breath, that he cannot seem to fill himself with enough air to sustain himself.

They twine quickly, and it is dizzying, speaking in no uncertain terms to the way in which they’ve craved this very moment, or how long. The gold fabric of Jongin’s cloak quickly ends a pool of fabric at their feet as they dance into one another, each step marked with a kiss. The pointed metal pauldrons clang when they hit the ground, accompanied by a distinct rattle of stones rolling away across the cobbles. Taemin struggles with the heat that rises up in him when Jongin fits his arms around the narrow column of his waist and draws him closer, kissing him for all he is worth. When they break, breathless, chuckling low in their own throats in sheer disbelief, Taemin is loath to break the silence that settles over them, both sated and restless.

Jongin is a god who practises mercy, and does the hard things for him.

“What is it that you wanted from me?” he asks. His lips shine, slick with Taemin’s spit, a little red from the force of their kiss. “When you came to the ball. Did you plan to see me at all?” He glows, now, having gotten what he wanted, and Taemin finds he hates Jongin all the more for it, hates being so seen, hates knowing that he’s been seen since their first time alone together.

He hates the shape of Jongin’s mouth, a pretty ‘o’ as he waits for Taemin’s reply.

To shut him up, Taemin kisses him again, crushing their mouths together, hard enough to bruise. This is the only chance they’ll have, he tells himself, and he must leave a mark behind. It’s what Jongin deserves -- a purpled smile, crescent moons cut into his hips and the sharp points of his shoulder blades, some evidence that he can be hurt, and that Taemin should be the one to do it.

Their tongues slide upon one another, slick, warm, inviting. Taemin cannot fathom having denied himself this for so long. Not when the reality is so much better than any dream, any masturbatory idea that had kept him company on many a long, lonely night.

Now, though, it’s Jongin’s turn to pull away, some mix of hurt and incredulity in his eyes. “You won’t talk to me anymore?” he asks, pouting. His swollen bottom lip entices Taemin to go further, to take more that he’s so patiently not done every time he’s wanted to since arriving here, since making this place -- since making Jongin -- his home. “I should have known you’d be all business.” He’s surprisingly tender, when he reaches up and cards his hand through the mess that has become Taemin’s hair. “I heard you were a bit…”

“Call me a whore again,” Taemin says, voice caught in his throat, though he can’t say it’s because of arousal more than it is emotion threatening to overwhelm him entirely. If he twitches in spite of the tightness of the blacks he’d donned this evening, he can blame nothing but the temptation he’s been so boldly facing head-on. “Do it.”

“Fine.” Jongin looks sulky, his brow set, though his eyes shine bright with mischief. “You’re a fucking whore and I shouldn’t be wasting my time with you. Is that what you want to hear? Is that what you’ve needed all this time, is for me to think less of you?”

In answer to this accusation Taemin grabs Jongin by the thick metal collar and drags him into another kiss, one that buckles him at the knees. He takes Jongin with him, and they sink to the floor of the chapel. Above them the sounds of their kisses, endless and spiteful, echo among the rafters. “You’re better than me, aren’t you?” Taemin demands in the gaps in which they gasp for breath, out of their depth and all the worse for it. “You’re better than everyone. A god, aren’t you?”

Jongin blinks, glancing around, and drags his thumb across the pad of Taemin’s bottom lip, trying to quell what has been building only to be loosed without regard for grace. The insults are a poor farce at wanting him to stop, but Jongin’s always been at least halfway good at playing his part. His misty eyes dim under the half-hearted praise. Taemin thinks it must be the reminder -- of the expectations, the pressure, everything he doesn’t want to be. 

Taemin expects nothing from him, not now, with his palms pressed to Jongin’s chest, keeping him close, but not close enough that his brilliance might burn. When he wants to catch on fire, they both will know it.

“If you think yourself a god,” says Taemin, his gaze level with the Prince’s, “then fuck me like one.” His hands are insistent, tingling as he pushes at the slackened edges of Jongin’s celebration vestments, trying to divest him of them quickly. “Fuck,” he says quietly, then louder, sure that the ancestors surrounding them will hear and bring something wicked down upon his head.

Taemin, he finds, does not care what happens to his head, not when Jongin is so infuriatingly gorgeous, especially when he’s half-naked on an altar devoted to him.

“There’s so many gods-damned buckles and baubles and traps on this thing,” he says aloud, as if this tiny vent cut into his frustration will somehow undo months’ worth of silent determination to keep it quiet. “Can you fucking _help me_?”

Jongin blinks once, twice, and takes Taemin’s hands off him. “You want me to fuck you?” he asks, the corner of his mouth quirking up in that vexatious way of his. “You want me so badly you’d commit sacrilege in the eyes of my forefathers?”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to perform in front of an audience.” It’s a joke, but one that tastes of the rust and salt that gather at the corner of his kiss-smashed mouth. Taemin tugs at the knot keeping the top layer of Jongin’s royal costume together. “Help me or I’m leaving,” he says. “Don’t you want me? Isn’t that what all this is about? You chasing after me until I break, just like everyone else?”

“Shut your mouth, whore,” Jongin mutters, taking Taemin’s face between his hands and kissing him again, again, again.

Between kisses, Taemin finds his knife, remembers even in a haze how talented he is with it, and starts cutting away garments, one by one. The many layers fall to the floor, a makeshift bedding not nearly befitting of a prince. Jongin laughs, though the sound dies as the blade of Taemin’s blades brush against the taut muscles of his abdomen, his thighs, his waist. At long last they end up nude, chest-to-chest, intimate. Taemin can feel the Prince’s quickened heartbeat against his own, and they’re learning each other, mapping out each curve, every hill and valley. Taemin traipses fingers along each of the Prince’s ribs, learning the shapes they take beneath his fingerprints. Jongin responds in turn by fitting his hands against Taemin’s waist, drawing him even closer together. They take no pleasure save one another’s and drink it in the way they drink of one another’s mouths, every heavy breath punctuated with its reverb along the cavernous ceiling.

“You’re beautiful,” murmurs Jongin against Taemin’s lips, daintily lapping the blood that had gathered in the corner. “You’re better than anyone, you’re a king all of your own, my stunning raven king.” It doesn’t even make sense, but Taemin relishes in the praise all the same after spending so long trying to deny the wants his Prince has of him

Every touch threatens to sear directly through him and turn him to ash with its intensity. He finds the solid muscle of Jongin’s thighs, drinks in the way a thin sheen of sweat has already started to form on the muscle that he himself has worked carefully to carve into Jongin’s royal flesh. Then he’s pushing Jongin away, apart, spreading his legs to see him fully.

Here, he knows as he perches between Jongin’s parted knees, is his throne.

There is something unspeakable about the way Jongin looks beneath him, splayed out for his pleasure. He wants to worship, to take his time, but the way his cock tugs insistently between his own thighs promises him that he won’t make it that far. Still, he licks his lips, admires for a long time the diaphanous gold that wraps around Jongin’s throat, his wrists, his ankles. He drags a finger along the gilded line, flecking and dry, painted upon his forehead, from the center all the way down the bridge of his nose.

“Get my clothes,” says Jongin, so quietly that it seems he, too, does not want to ruin the tension that has formed. Taemin does as he’s instructed, sifting with shaking hands through the shreds of fine fabric. In time enough finds a little glass bottle, stoppered with a crystal.

“Typical,” he all but scoffs, rolling his eyes as he uncorks the oil. “You’re such a fucking brat, you know that? Making me want you all this time, knowing I could do nothing but lust after you at a distance…” As he speaks, he coats his fingers with the sticky substance, then turns his back to Jongin. His knees dig hard into the cold stone floor, sure to bruise later. He teases a finger against his own rim, and the sound he makes is sinful, a ragged keen of Jongin’s name, a plea to be fucked. Taemin can feel the eyes of the idols on him again, their celestial judgment upon him long since passed. In this moment the most important thing on him right now is Jongin’s gaze, the heat and weight of it making Taemin’s cock stir so violently that he thinks, for one terrifying second, that he might release right then and there.

“Don’t come,” murmurs Jongin, seeming to sense the tension suddenly filling Taemin’s spine. His hands find purchase in the hollows of Taemin’s hips, drawing him closer, that he might see the sight of Taemin filled with his own touch, hear each lewd sound of him fucking himself onto his own fingers. “Show me what you’ve been doing. You’ve been getting off, haven’t you? Thinking about me?”

Taemin doesn’t answer this, instead bowing his spine, til his elbows keep him upright rather than his knees and his chest can almost rest against the cobbled floor of the chapel. His bottom lip catches beneath his top teeth, and he bites down so hard as he works another finger into himself, showing Jongin just what it is he’s been doing when they spend time apart. “Can’t help myself,” Taemin says, as if it’s something to be proud of. The words come out a hiss from between his clenched teeth. “Think about you constantly, the way you’ve grown since…” 

The thought of _before_ makes his heart sink a bit. He does not have time to examine this, not when his own hands are inadequate every inch of his insides ache to have Jongin occupy them.

Jongin must sense this, because he takes one hand from Taemin’s hips, wraps slender fingers around Taemin’s wrist, guides him to fuck himself harder, but no faster. The slow pace, the stretch of it, the sweet burn intermingled with Jongin’s direction, makes Taemin moan, a long, heady sound that makes Jongin whimper as well.

“You’ve wanted me all this time?” Jongin asks, voice full of marvel. The reverent way in which he speaks makes Taemin curl his fingers inside himself, searching out that spot inside him that makes him believe that perhaps there is one god, all of them, all at once. He sees a flash of white, and the cock between his legs hangs so heavy and swollen that he might be hurtling toward his completion without his consent. “Is this how you imagine me treating you, whore? Watching you get off for me like you’re as pathetic as everyone says you are?” He pauses, and the sound of his swallowing is audible even under the whimpers Taemin is driving from himself with each thrust of his hand. “Is it true you asked your lovers that you might call them by my name?”

Taemin moans again, colouring down his throat and into his chest, knowing he must curse someone but unable to recall exactly who it might be. “Take me already,” he says, commanding even when his voice is tremulous and threatens to break. He punctuates his thoughts with thrusts of his own fingers, frantic and heated as he works himself open, the occupation of his hands leaving him wishing he could grip tight at every inch of Jongin he’s been given. Each sentence comes out stunted, a thought made between insistent presses of his own touch inside himself. “I’ve been patient, haven’t I? I’ve tried warding you off, tried keeping a cool head, tried fucking you out of my system with someone else, and you haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said, you thick-headed, spoiled, stubborn fucking--”

And Jongin leaves him entirely, leaving Taemin cold on the stone floor. The sweat on his skin makes him shiver here in the cold air. He slows his fingers, reluctant to finish without getting what he came for. Somewhere in the melee the bottle of oil must have rolled away, its high tinkling no match for whatever noise they’ve been making. When he rejoins Taemin, it’s with arms around his middle, dragging him close and seating him in his lap. His hand is strong around Taemin’s wrist, yanking at him, fingertips digging in hard enough to bruise.

“Tell me some more what I am,” goads Jongin in that throaty tone of his, the one he reserves for when they’re fighting and he’s winning, a rare enough occurrence that Taemin must pause to decipher it. The head of his cock slides against Taemin’s waiting entrance, and he tips his head back and lets Jongin slide a slick palm down the plane of his chest. A wanton moan slips from between his lips when Jongin finds a nipple, pinches it hard, not at all the gentle lover some whispers had led Taemin to believe he might be.

He can feel the insistent prod of Jongin’s cock and, not able to wait any longer, slips a hand between them. He wraps his wet fingers around Jongin’s length and holds him still before sinking down onto him.

The sensation of fullness is so great, so all-encompassing that his vision goes black a moment, just a quick one, just long enough that he can catch himself falling back against Jongin’s chest, into his waiting arms. Those arms fit around him perfectly, and beneath him, Jongin’s hips start to move. “Tell me more,” says Jongin in a low growl. Taemin tips his head just so, sees the pleasure blossoming on the prince’s face, the way colour blooms pretty in his cheeks. Each sentence ends with a thrust. “Tell me every time I’ve made you feel abandoned. That’s what gods do, don’t they? They leave the nonbelievers behind.” Sweat gathers at his temple, across his forehead, making that gold paint Taemin had so admired start to run, to smear. 

They kiss, just briefly, far too tender for everything Taemin still has inside him, every hatred and resentment that has filled him since the moment they met.

“You want me to believe in you, you man masquerading as a god?” Taemin says, and then gasps out when Jongin’s hips shift, sliding into him just so. He bites into Jongin’s lip, tugging at it, the angle giving him the advantage. 

The hands at Taemin’s chest roam his body now, finding the curves of his ribs, the line of his hips, the soft but toned flesh of his thighs. He finds a bruise -- an incident of fortune, one the likes of which Taemin might never have confessed. It’s still fortuitous, because when he digs his nails into it, Taemin yelps. His leaking cock betrays him, twitching mightily, and he barely has time to gasp out a demand that the prince stop before the tautness that has been building in his abdomen threatens to snap.

Jongin, attentive if nothing else, sees what this does to Taemin, the trick he’s taught himself to do, and does it again. Again. Again. Merciless. Touch hammering against every mark that their practises have left upon his skin. And Taemin can’t take it.

He comes with Jongin’s name on his lips, his throat exposed, his head ready to roll. His seed spills all across the chapel floor where they sit, entwined. 

“You’re depraved, aren’t you,” purrs Jongin, his breath hot and heavy against the bejeweled shell of Taemin’s ear as he presses his fingertips into those bruises for a tenth, hundredth, thousandth time, leaving his fingerprints upon Taemin’s skin over and over and over, until Taemin is certain they are branded into him. “Coming like that without letting me do the same. Making a mess on my floor. And without my even touching you!” The smirk in his voice is evident. “You think I won’t make you do that again?”

And this gods-damned prince, this lover he’s taken, will be the death of him. Taemin knows it, can see the future in which his life ends prematurely all because he couldn’t keep his lust in check. But if lust is a crime then the gods here, watching him, have yet to condemn him, and still he breathes.

So he turns his head, kisses Jongin again. “So do it. Prove to me all the things you say you’d do for me, _god_.”

Jongin sinks his teeth into the slim, pale column of Taemin’s throat, and raps an impetuous knuckle against that same bruise he’d used to make Taemin come a first time.

///

(Later, when they’ve taken their fill of one another, Jongin does not bother to gather the scraps of his robes; they are sticky with seed and sweat and the intangible filth of committing blasphemy in a room full of his ancestors. Taemin, weak in the knees, can barely bring himself to wobble into his own clothes, the golden laces of his blacks something with which he fumbles more than once before Jongin offers to help him, tender in his eyes.

There is paint beneath his nails, in the ridges of his fingertips, on his lips. He smacks them, breathes in the scent of sex, takes this moment for what it is -- a momentary lapse in judgment gone horribly right.

“You’ll have to walk back naked,” Taemin points out as Jongin laces him back into his clothing, wanting only for this moment, this night, this _safety_ to last forever. “You’ll get caught. However would you explain to them where those fancy silks and satins of yours have gone?”

Jongin glances past Taemin, to the altar, to the large stone slab just behind the pulpit with the names of every king that has preceded him carved into its surface. From behind that glows a faint candlelight that Taemin, in his few, far-between visits to this place has never once noticed. “I won’t,” he promises.

“What makes you say that?”

In response, Jongin kisses the corner of Taemin’s mouth. His lips taste of release long since spent, a touch sour and too sweet for Taemin to name. “Just trust me. I’ll tell you how it all works later.” He pauses. “Better yet, I’ll _show_ you sometime.”

Later, Taemin remembers that promise, and wishes that he had been privy to all the things Jongin had yet to tell him.

Perhaps he could have saved them, if only he’d known.)


	6. 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I propose a trade,” he says at last, perching himself on the edge of the bed. His knuckles wrap around the hem of his fur blanket. He tugs the pelt around his waist. It is not cold here, but realisation runs cold in his veins regardless. “You have given me several secrets. Let me give you some.”
> 
> “Of course.” Jongin crosses the room. He is barefoot, and the soles of his feet are dirty with the unswept corridors that have led him to Taemin’s bedroom. He still is resplendent. Taemin bites his tongue to keep from saying as much aloud. “May I sit with you, teacher?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hellooooooo this is a short chapter and i am not sorry about that!!!  
> thank you so SO much to everyone who's given support while this has been happening — i don't think i've mentioned this before but this is my first time writing a complete work and posting it in segments, and the fact that i've gotten any feedback at all is absolutely Amazing to me. so thank y'all for sitting with me. we're almost home. ♥

The first expectation that Taemin has, after that first night of true, green spring, is that things will change. That their torrid affair had been the product of one ball’s worth of frustration, one season’s worth of buildup finally laid to rest.

That next true morning, a full cycling of the sun later, there is a page knocking at his door before he even wakes. The poor thing -- he quakes when he offers the book, held aloft on wobbly elbows. A history of the castle itself, drawn diagrams of secret passages, peepholes, rooms in which people taking their pleasure might hide, should they find they have the need.

Taemin smirks as he pages through the book several times, commits the various maps to memory. He wonders if -- when -- he’s meant to return it. 

When next they meet face to face, it is with a midnight visit on the Prince’s part. One moment Taemin is staring down at diagrams of secret passages, trying to commit them to memory only for his eyes to fall heavy. The next, there is a knock on the door, too heavy to be his usual late-night companion. He goes, wild-eyed and messy-haired, to answer, his cloak wrapped around his shoulders for modesty, though he does not expect anyone at this hour to put upon him to be modest.

There before him is the Prince.

Taemin’s throat goes sandy. His tongue is too heavy to speak. He stands aside. Jongin closes the door behind him quietly.

“No one saw me come,” Jongin says, as if that’s comfort. As if he hasn’t indirectly handed Taemin information that might supplement theories to the contrary. What a fool this man is, he thinks, a hand to his ailing forehead. There is a pain that forms there, just beyond his eye.

Taemin begins pacing the floor of his bedroom. His cloak, usually revered, falls to the floor in a crumpling heap; the sound of it reminds Taemin of lives he’s taken, and he promises to apologise later if he needs to. As he moves, he does not look Jongin in the eye, instead focusing on the wringing of his own hands before his navel. Jongin, casually dressed -- a hard reset from the person he’d been upon his chapel floor three nights prior -- leans against the wall, just next to Taemin’s door. He crosses his legs at the ankle. He makes such a lovely picture. Taemin curses the thought.

“Why did you give me that book?” Taemin asks, voice tight.

Jongin just shrugs, as if it means nothing to him, the giving of valuable information. Perhaps it doesn’t. “I want you to know all the things that I have learned living here all my life.”

It explains everything and nothing.

Taemin is forced to remember a fantasy he’d had once upon a time, in which he’d dreamed of what he might pay to learn a prince’s secrets, hold them to himself. Now, they are worth less than the gold he’d thought they might be.

“I propose a trade,” he says at last, perching himself on the edge of the bed. His knuckles wrap around the hem of his fur blanket. He tugs the pelt around his waist. It is not cold here, but realisation runs cold in his veins regardless. “You have given me several secrets. Let me give you some.”

“Of course.” Jongin crosses the room. He is barefoot, and the soles of his feet are dirty with the unswept corridors that have led him to Taemin’s bedroom. He still is resplendent. Taemin bites his tongue to keep from saying as much aloud. “May I sit with you, teacher?”

Taemin nods curtly, inching over that they might both have room. Their shoulders brush when Jongin takes his seat. “What do you want to know?” he asks, unaware what pertinent knowledge he could possibly offer a monarch in the midst of being primed for world leadership. 

“You don’t believe in me,” says Jongin after a heavy pause. “Why not? What do you believe in?”

Their hips bump when Taemin shifts suddenly, staring Jongin down. “What do you mean, what do I believe in?” It’s a dangerous question. Taemin would be stupid not to have noticed the lack of discussion of magic here. Even bringing up to his best friend the question of his blood, when they were deep into their cups, brought a stiffness to the conversation that could not be explained by the hour of night. “Who’s to say I believe in anything?”

Jongin looks so small, so childlike. “Everyone believes in something, teacher. Even you. Your heart isn’t too far removed from humanity not to believe in something.”

He’s taught this one too well, thinks Taemin, lamenting quietly the sharpness of his pupil.

“Fine,” he sputters. “I believe in the fox and hound and raven. They are the gods of the south, and the common people where I’m from.” He colours down the column of his throat here, as if discussing religion embarrasses him. It’s easier to pretend that than admit the truth: that the distance between himself and the Prince unsettles him. “They keep the earth and the sky and the people in order. The raven brings the rain and the crops and changes the seasons, makes the sun rise in the sky. The fox makes sure that the earth grows as she is meant to, and takes care of the animals, that they might be hunted but never die out. And the hound watches over men. She is faithful and loyal and ensures that people do good, even if sometimes they do bad.” He debates whether to say aloud the last part of the gospel, then decides a secret isn’t worth trading if he can’t give it away completely. “She also protects people from wicked magic, when they perform it, or unearth it if it comes to that.” He swallows thickly. He fixes his eyes on Jongin.

The Prince stares back, almost blank in his reception of the information. “Why do you believe in them?”

This is a stupid line of questioning. Taemin nearly says so, but the twinkle of wonder in his eyes with which Jongin fixes him is worth a thousand pockets’ worth of that gold he so covets.

“Because they raised me.” Taemin catches his bottom lip between his teeth, hard enough to sting, that he doesn’t say anymore.

“Do you have parents, teacher?”

“None I’ve ever met. A brother in the orphanage, but a family took him for a workhorse long before anyone ever took me.” He pauses briefly, looks down at the place where his hand has settled, watches the way their little fingers catch upon one another, hooked at the first knuckle. “You have given me one secret, and I have given you at least three.”

“Mine is an entire book,” Jongin points out, head cocked and a touch of a grin at his mouth. “It will not take you only a few moments to learn mine. I think it’s worth quite a few.”

“Fine. What else do you want to know?” And though he might hate conversation, especially with the Prince, who has proven a poor partner in the past, he finds himself grinning right back.

“What do you know about magic?”

“Enough. I can’t do it myself, so it isn’t particularly pertinent. I know it exists. I know people who can fix me if it hurts me. I know it runs in the blood, in the descendents of winged folk who have long since ceased to dance under the moonlight. That’s more than I need to know.”

“What did you know about the person who wanted you to kill my father?”

That takes Taemin by surprise. Well, that, and the even closer proximity between them -- as if they had gravitated toward one another without realising. When he blinks, glances up, he sees that he and the Prince could touch noses with just one wrong -- or right -- bob of the head. Jongin’s breath is sweet, clean, warm when it fans fingers against the apple of Taemin’s cheek. “I knew what I needed to know about that, too. That the pay was good and that your father was ill. I never know the names of people who hire me. It’s… safer, that way.”

Jongin makes a face, something between disappointment and dismay. “A shame. I had hoped to promote them to a lordship, should I find their identity pleasing enough.”

“Do you not know the names and faces of your enemies? Or is that something a bit too advanced for your current training?”

“My father knows all these things,” Jongin sighs. He flops backward onto the bed. It’s a careful motion. He must have noticed the touching hands, too, because he tries not to dislodge the point of contact. “He does not think it pertinent for me to know, I suppose.”

This reminds Taemin of something. He tries to place it, but it flutters away, a bird upon the wind. Instead he lies beside Jongin, their shoulders and elbows and fingers touching. He wishes himself bolder, just a touch, that he might comfort the Prince who had so unkindly come to visit him with a kiss. After all, sadness suits him, but not well enough that a lover might bear it well.

Instead he touches his free hand to the line of Jongin’s brow. “It is a shame,” he says softly. “A star like you deserves to shoot through every sky.”

Jongin snorts out a laugh. “You’re being flattering.” He moves to roll away.

“And what about it?” asks Taemin, voice low, level, calming. Jongin holds his position. A good soldier. “You think I haven’t noticed you attempting to flatter me all this time? Perhaps some reciprocation is in order by now.”

Jongin’s ears are pink, but he does not hide his face. “Do you think of me still?” he asks in a whisper.

Taemin’s throat dries a second time. “Constantly,” he admits. The revelation sets him free.

A hand reaches up and cups his jaw, traces the hinge of it in a circular pattern. “Would you mind if I kissed you right now?” asks Jongin, rough with want that neither of them have it in them to deny.

In answer, Taemin surges forward, closing the gap between them. He tastes of a god’s mouth a second time, and finds himself alive for it.

///

He supposes things _do_ change, if only because there are little signs of Jongin littering his body, his thoughts, and his existence. The gifts of before -- books, and sharpened blades, and little notes -- have started to come with a frequency that might attract unwarranted eyes, were Jongin not so skilled at playing this game. He’ll send an advisor to give something to some unimportant page, who’ll then take it to his master, who’ll then give it to a servant, who’ll bring it to Taemin’s quarters. All it ever ends up being is another tome, another knife stolen from the corpse of some criminal against the crown, some love note in a language that Jongin’s no business knowing but does anyway.

Taemin clutches each note to his chest, when its bearer has disappeared behind the illusion of safety provided by a closed door. The writing reminds him of home, even though the message does not. He should not equate Jongin to feelings of _home_ , he knows; what they are doing is dangerous enough.

“Did you get my note?” asks Jongin, when they reconvene, Jongin in his padding and Taemin in his sturdy leathers. “I don’t know what path it took to you, but --”

Taemin sniffs, unamused, though he can’t help the way his mouth upturns. “Less talking,” he says, “and more fighting, hm?” He raises a blade, and starts the swift movement of combat, the only solace he can take in a time when so much is abnormal.

Their lessons are a welcome ritual. Or, at least, they would be, should Jongin stop looking upon Taemin’s face as if he’s something to be devoured yet another time. Now, his steps are quicker, more sure, as if he’d taken the lesson about watching and learning of one’s opponent to heart and merely saved it for the day when he had the advantage. Though he won’t admit it, Taemin knows that he falters on purpose more days than not, if only for the feeling of Jongin pinning him to a tree. His knees still ache from the ball, from the subsequent dalliances in which they’ve participated since that fateful night. His bruises are more frequent in the way they spot his skin -- the supple flesh of his inner thighs, the downward curve of his waist, the soft spot just beneath where his pulse beats in his wrist.

Jongin takes his time, when they’ve the time to take. Taemin admires this about him, though it is a stark departure from their first coupling.

Now, they spend their time in weapons racks, trying not to be caught when their little fingers so much as brush in passing, jerking away like men burned but exchanging sly glances upon realising that no one is watching. Taemin lectures on the importance of keeping a blade sharp. It isn’t the first time, but he’s got his sticking points and no one can blame him for them.

Still, Jongin’s eyes glint out some diabolical message in the lamplight that Taemin can’t help but decipher. He loses his train of thought more than once, and it’s for the worse when Jongin throws his head back and laughs, charmed by the stumbling of his beloved teacher. It seems he’s charmed by everything Taemin does these days.

“If you’re going to love me this much,” Taemin mutters, rubbing at his tormented hip when he walks directly into an armour rack, “then perhaps you could put that love to good use.”

Jongin gets quiet after that. “That’s quite the word you used on me,” he says, much later, when the lesson has concluded and they’re pressed into the dusty wall, the gentle clanging of swords their accompaniment as they kiss. “Do you remember what it means, or is your heart all black from years of killing?” 

In fairness, Jongin knows not what he does when he wraps a lock of Taemin’s too-long hair around the tip of his pointer finger. Nor does he know about the thing that had turned Taemin’s heart black in the first place. The things he’d done in order to survive. Perhaps he never will. Though he does not relish in the idea of protecting any grown man from the harsh realities of the world -- and much less a king, who will be forced to rule upon matters such as these -- Taemin cannot imagine what Jongin’s reaction might be if he thinks his lover giving him a hard time is what constitutes cruelty.

He does not neglect the notion that Jongin’s power will get him in trouble. But when the Prince’s lips are upon his own, it is difficult to recall why, exactly, it matters what happens to his head, when this life could be so much easier to bear simply by virtue of giving in to temptation.

Still, he is always looking over his shoulder, watching, waiting for some sign. Should the whispers tell him what truth his traitor mouth threatens to betray whenever he sees his few acquaintances in the castle’s corridors, Taemin would put a stop to it immediately. He could, at the very least, do that.

///

In the evenings, when even the most dedicated of servants has retired to bed for another early morning to come, Taemin finds that the Prince likes the feeling of furs rather than his own royal sheets. He wraps Taemin in his arms, kisses him like he’s been holding his breath all day for the chance. He sifts through the layers of notes that he’s written, squinting down at his own handwriting. 

“I didn’t know you knew the language,” Taemin confesses softly, his bare torso pressed to Jongin’s back, trying to pull him into another kiss. 

Jongin, smirking, recites one of the lines he’d put in. _If only I could have the taste of you on my tongue always, I’d never have to eat again._ His pride shines through in the brightness of his eyes, the high tilt of his chin.

Taemin just laughs, and kisses the corner of his mouth. “Oh, love,” he breathes, exhilarated, “your poetry is pretty, but your accent could use some work.”

“Is that so?” Jongin sulks. He has never taken well to teasing. The spoiled royal in him, supposes Taemin, for lack of better ideas. He wraps his arms around Jongin’s waist, and draws him close, their groins pressed together in a fervour that cannot be explained by a couple days’ worth of waiting.

Taemin repeats the line, but his accent is pristine. He says it again, slowly, watching the shape of Jongin’s mouth as he forms the words. _If only I could have the taste of you on my tongue always, I’d never have to eat again._ He says it again, again, again, until it means everything, until Jongin gets even the twisting consonant in the middle correct. 

By the end of their night, dawn cresting through the window of Taemin’s bedchamber, Taemin is up to his head in cock, bent on all fours and taking Jongin for all he’s worth. From his mouth spill the filthy curses that his native tongue affords him, the laboured grunts mingling musically with the rounded accent that his home has bestowed upon him even after all these years. 

He knows, later, that he doesn’t imagine Jongin fucking into him harder at the provocation that speaking his own language has afforded him. He bruises with the knowledge that his Prince is weak to things he does not know and cannot without work. He trickles with remnants of Jongin’s seed as he stumbles feebly to the bath he’d asked to have prepared for him by early morning light, aware he had hit a nerve that he’s sure to hit again if it makes him come this hard.

It’s nice, he decides, learning about someone you love.

The thought is a knife to his throat, but he’s willing to fall anyway.

///

More than they fuck -- which is, frankly, quite a bit, Taemin limping to their lessons more often than he’d like to admit -- they _talk_. Jongin, alone, unburdened by the expectations of the throne awaiting him, is funny. Clever. Romantic, though whenever he says anything of that ilk, he wrinkles up like a dried fig and hides his face in Taemin’s blankets. “I can’t believe I just did that,” he says, and far be it from Taemin to embarrass him further, though the urge is there.

He drags Jongin up by his wrists, and kisses him like he means it, like he’s making a promise he doesn’t have the courage to speak aloud. 

Funny. He had once believed the streets had raised him brave. 

///

Ten chides him for his tardiness to their usual drinking appointments. They’ve long since stopped seeing one another naked, and Taemin thinks this must be for the best, considering. But they still have that same ritual they’ve kept since Taemin first came here, and he would be remiss were he not to acknowledge his gratitude for it. “Who is it?” asks Ten. “Is it Yukhei? I’ve seen the way he looks at you, and I can promise you, he won’t once make you decide to spend eternity with him if you don’t want, he usually just wants a quick--”

Taemin downs that thought with something stronger than their spiced wine, and glowers in Ten’s direction. The crowing he receives in response is enough to keep suspicion from his head, though only just. The clever little bastard, for all he likes to play fey, knows far more than he’ll ever say. If he does know what Taemin and Jongin are doing behind closed doors, he never lets Taemin know. The relief is tangible.

They toast to happiness. Ten’s elbow finds Taemin’s ribs, convivial and affectionate. They kiss cheeks when they part at the end of the night, their pockets almost empty and their giggles unable to be contained. It is good, he decides, that some things do not change.

///

Jongin practises languages with Taemin. He has no skill, no ear for them, but oh, does he try. In spite of himself, Taemin admires this -- the dedication and determination applied to all things: if not ruling, then those lessons offered him when they’re naked, splayed out across a linen-covered bed. And Taemin is happy to be a teacher of this, as well as many other things. He is the one who holds Jongin’s nose when he holds his breath too long, sucking cock the first time, his enthusiasm always his own stronger ruler than self-preservation. He is the one who cradles Jongin’s gently-blued face in his hands and thumbs over the tears on his cheeks so that they dissolve. “It is an art,” he points out. “You have to practise to get better at it.”

He does. Taemin comes himself dry that night, and when he can feel his legs again he pronounces Jongin a god and a master all over again.

Jongin’s responses to his lessons are always in Taemin’s native tongue, now. Clumsily spoken. It lacks the grace to which Taemin has become accustomed to expecting from his Prince. He repeats the phrases back. Jongin tries again. Right now his throat is sore, and the sunlight is filling the room the way molten metal fills a thin blade’s mold, and Jongin does not look like he feels up to talking so much as he does sleeping. But he tries again. He always, always tries again.

What he can’t get in speech, he can communicate perfectly in writing. His letters are longer, and more sentimental than the horny content he’d provided when he’d first started writing some weeks ago. (Has spring waned so quickly, and given way to a summer that burns freckles into the Prince’s skin? Taemin always reminds himself to count the constellations blooming brilliant against his face, but never remembers, too taken by the hands that grip him tight -- the same ones that write him poetry in a cypher he’d once thought he would forget.)

Over time the love notes at Taemin’s bedside stack up, until they are conspicuous, and Taemin has no place in which he might hide them that would not arouse further suspicion. He knows full well he should not keep them in the first place, least of all when his Prince has a tendency to throw caution to the wind. Still, he can’t help the sentiment, the softness he feels in the dead-center of his chest when he thinks of the look on Jongin’s face when he composes them. 

On a night during which he is alone, Taemin reads the letters over a final time, commits the words to memory, sounding them out to himself in the empty echo chamber of his bedroom. It’s an exercise in stupidity; the thoughts in Jongin’s head have already etched themselves unto his heart.

When he watches the notes crisp in his hearth, it is with tears glimmering in his eyes, with his very spirit singing to him the songs Jongin has written him, set to music he cannot quite hear. 

///

On an unseasonably cold night in which Taemin takes his usual drinks with Ten, Jongin sneaks into Taemin’s room before he even has occasion to be home. It is upon seeing him naked and buried in a mound of fur blankets that Taemin realises several things.

One, he hates to have kept his Prince waiting. The way in which Jongin’s eyes light up as he looks up to gaze upon his professed raven king smacks of anticipation; the way he stops writing, his letter abandoned amongst the blankets, to cross the floor and sweep Taemin into his embrace fills the assassin with such regret that he promises, silently, with a kiss that he’ll never do such a thing again. 

Two, he is completely taken with this man. He has not had the courage to say it, but for all Jongin’s professing that he might die for Taemin given the chance, Taemin’s heartbeat echoes the sentiment every single time. It is a realisation he has come to slowly but surely, made firm with every night he’s fallen asleep in Jongin’s arms only to wake up lonesome and longing.

Three, Jongin is not wearing a single thing. Not even the jewelry he keeps upon his head when they’re fucking, the circlet that normally threatens to topple right off his gorgeous head, growing more precarious with every thrust, every tangle of Taemin’s fingers in his hair. His hips press against Taemin’s. “Where are all your fine things, Your Majesty?” teases Taemin.

Jongin lights up, a pup who has finally achieved its master’s favour, and takes Taemin by the hand. He guides them both across the bedroom, seats Taemin upon the very edge of the feather-stuffed mattress, and fumbles in the covers for something.

When he holds the circlet aloft, it gleams bright in the lamplight.

He kneels before Taemin, whispering something indecipherable. Taemin makes a noise that asks Jongin to repeat himself.

“You are my king,” says Jongin, wide-eyed and innocent. He must be joking. He must know the sacrilege he commits against his bloodline. And yet, that look in his eyes says that if he knows, he must not care. “I want you to know that. That you are more important than my duty, to me. That you have become the most crucial component of my very being, in all this time. And that I am thankful to the gods you worship, for guiding you here.”

“You cannot speak of my gods,” murmurs Taemin, stock-still with sheer disbelief. “Should anyone hear you they’d hang you for a traitor.”

“Then let them hang me,” Jongin dares. “Give me your head.”

Taemin, for a moment, is stricken with the urge to play a joke, to whip his length from beneath his breeches if only for a semblance of normalcy that goes beyond this frantic, religious hysteria with which Jongin seems to have been stricken.

He does not.

Instead he bends at the waist at Jongin’s behest, dips his head, and lets himself be crowned.

When he holds his head high, shoulders straight, Jongin looks upon him as if it is he who is the false idol, as if he is worthy of the reverence of thousands rather than an audience of one.

Then he climbs into Taemin’s lap, takes his neck in both hands, and kisses him as if he will die without it.

Perhaps, thinks Taemin as he loses himself in the Prince’s lips, he will. Perhaps they both will. Perhaps dying is sweeter and more succinct than spending a lifetime pretending not to want this man who looks at him as if he is worth sacrifice.

They hold each other, Jongin carefully peeling every layer from Taemin’s frame only to admire him in the gold light of the wee hours. He kisses every inch of Taemin’s skin, admonishes every scar, pauses to ask the stories that Taemin has told no one save the darkness what has rocked him to sleep night after night, alone. Taemin tells his stories in the clipped way his homeland has given him, careful not to reveal too much, to shield Jongin from the idea that people could have gone out of their way to hurt him. 

There is one, just above his navel. Jongin worships this mark most of all, laves his tongue over it slowly until Taemin is panting and writhing in the blankets. “There was a man,” Taemin gasps out, when Jongin’s tongue presses into the indent of Taemin’s abdomen, measured and deliberate. “He was-- ah, he was my mentor. Taught me about this profession. Gave me the name ‘viper’ before anyone else thought to use it against me. He gave me this one. Taught me my first lesson with a dagger pommel to the gut, wrenched it into me. The jewel of it, ah, ah, the jewel broke skin. He did it intentionally, said to never forget that I can be hurt even by the people I trust most.”

“Did you trust him?” asks Jongin between languid passes of his tongue over the sharp angles of Taemin’s hips. 

“I did-- oh, oh, _Jongin_ \-- I did trust him, I had to.” Taemin can barely think the words before they’re spilling from his mouth.

“Do you trust me?”

Jongin’s worshipful mouth has stopped its careful ministrations. He is staring up into Taemin’s face.

Taemin props up on his elbows. This is a trap and he knows it. Whether he can help falling in is a different matter entirely.

“I trust you, Jongin.”

He swears he can measure time by the breaths hanging between them, ragged and uneven as they are.

“I trust you, Taemin.”

The Prince has never spoken his name before. A shudder roils through Taemin, violent as every scar left upon his body, and he grips Jongin by the shoulders, drags him up from his spot on the bed beside him. He kisses his Prince with every ounce of good will and love and ardour his body contains.

Taemin trusts no one at this court. That is what his head tells him. But his traitor mouth has spoken, and his heart follows with the knowledge that it is the truth.  



	7. 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ll stop,” Taemin lies through gritted teeth. “For you, Ten, my one friend—for you I will stop. And no one else.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, i am sorry that this is sad. my beta cried. i cried. we all might cry.

The first place where their hearts met is the most sacred to them both -- Jongin’s chapel, in the dead of night, when no one should find them save the watchful eyes of gods long dead, immortal only in their cast gold and bronze. They are alone this night, Jongin and Taemin splitting between them the passages that lead into this room, numerous as they are.

Still, they are too stupid by far, finding it progressively easier to kiss when they’re convinced no one can see. It seems inevitable they might be caught.

It surprises Taemin, though he doesn’t know why, that they aren’t caught when Jongin sits high in his throne, his cock buried in the back of Taemin’s throat. Their hands wind together gingerly atop Jongin’s spread thighs, their fingers threaded.

“My raven king,” breathes Jongin, his voice echoing through the empty courtroom as he gathers himself to his feet and takes Taemin’s face in his hands. Each sentiment is punctuated with a salty kiss. “My love, my darling, my sweetheart, I am in your sway entirely.” He shamelessly tips his head up toward Jongin’s, their eyes meeting with so much emotion. “I would do anything for you, do you know? I would make you king myself if only I could. You deserve that.” His thumb streaks damply against the apple of Taemin’s cheek, and he blushes so high and so pretty in his throat that Taemin thinks he might fall in love all over again.

When did that happen? He is forced to wonder, but only for a moment, only as long as it takes him to drag himself from Jongin’s eyes.

It is in spite of the voice, speaking so many words that Taemin cannot confess he has longed to hear, that Taemin hears the shuffling of footsteps, the vague stuttering of an escape hastily made. Taemin, of all people, should know, not only being fine-tuned to those noises but having made many escapes of his own through the years. 

“What is it?” His distraction must read plain on his face.

Taemin swallows, mouth dry. “Someone heard us,” he says in his sandy whisper. “Someone was here, I heard them leave.”

Jongin, unfit to be seen by anyone save his royal dresser, is still too knock-kneed to give chase. Taemin knows this, and knows the clandestine passages that lead to the chapel by heart. He tears down one of them, a knife drawn from his boot, ready to take down whatever -- whomever -- might threaten the one shred of happiness he’s tried to take from this place.

In the end, he finds nothing. No one. There are no souls in secret passages late at night, only cobwebs gathering in corners, promises left unmade, vows left broken, tearful, and resting in the dirt that cakes the spaces between cold cobblestones. A cold fear grips his heart even as it beats against the hold of anxiety; that same frozen blood tries to slip into his veins, spreading from his chest to the tips of his fingers.

When he at last trudges back to the chapel, Jongin is still there, seated upon the pulpit, looking just as lovely as before Taemin’s stark departure. “Did you find them?” He is eating an apple left for him in tribute. There is blood upon the fruit’s flesh when he holds it away. Tender gums, tender hearts.

Taemin sighs, shakes his head. He does not admit the fright that threatens to rend his blood vessels from his body. “Nothing.”

Jongin drops the apple into the pile of coins and fruit and dried meat and cheese that encircles his holy seat. “Nothing?” he repeats, panic creeping into his own voice. Taemin does not know what to do to quell the fear for himself; he does not know how he might reassure an entire other human being.

So he takes Jongin into his arms. “Perhaps we should take a break,” he starts, voice straining with a reason he wishes he did not have to have. His words echo back to him from the cathedral’s hand-carved ceilings, hollow. He looks up at them so that Jongin does not have to know the tears that have gathered in the corner of his eye. “Perhaps, for safety, we should not see one another.”

But his Prince, his beloved god-made-human, sets his jaw stubbornly, and Taemin is so weary with this same fight that he nearly collapses against Jongin’s chest in pleas. “I am the future king,” he says, solemn. “If someone would want to defy me, I should have their head.”

_I have defied your order already,_ thinks Taemin. The sound of his own voice in his head is bitter and unwelcoming, reminding him of a person he had been upon arriving within these hallowed halls, before Jongin had come along and ruined every resolve the cold streets and long nights had forced him into making. _I have broken your laws. I have fucked a god, and fallen for him._

“Whoever it is… they’ll talk. They’ll know.” Taemin scrabbles down Jongin’s chest with all his nails, caked with dirt as they are. “They’ll tell someone, Jongin, _please_ \--”

“Let them tell whoever they want,” says Jongin. He catches Taemin’s scratching hand in his own, lifts the tender flesh of his wrist to his own lips. “They cannot hurt me.”

And wherever that fear had dripped in from had been a dam about to break. It does, under those words. “Please, don’t be _stupid_ ,” and Taemin does cry here, something he cannot say with certainty that he’s done before in the presence of anyone, lover or mentor or target. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

Jongin grips both Taemin’s wrists tight now. “Do you trust me?” he asks.

Taemin nods, bottom lip caught between his teeth.

“Then do it,” and here he pushes away this assassin, this raven king, this worthless clod of dirt unfit to be trod beneath royal heels. He has made a mistake, he has made a _lethal_ mistake.

When they part, it is not with lips on lips, as it might be any other night. It is with a promise. “Whatever happens to you,” swears Jongin, bent at the knee and peering up into Taemin’s teary eyes, “whatever anyone tries to do to you, they will have to go through me first.”

And Taemin, like a fool believes him.

He sinks to the floor of the chapel, and prays to every ancestor of Jongin’s that has ever lived that he might be safe long enough to love this man as he deserves to be loved or, failing that, kill the King who is sure to tear them apart.

///

The whispers slip in, insidious, terrified, lascivious.

“Did you hear about the viper? Turns out he’s been playing in the wrong berry bush and taken a bite of the wrong man.”

They say it with their pinkies to their lips, a table and a world away, as if he is not even there. In fact, they discuss it just loud enough that he could hear, were he listening.

Taemin, much to his great detriment, is _always_ listening. It is the only thing that has kept him alive. 

“Hasn’t he learned better?” This particular courtier, one with pretty eyes and pretty hands and far too many rings to have earned any titles himself, seems to relish in the discomfort of others; whenever Taemin squirms beneath the accusations flung at his back, his voice grows louder. Just a touch. 

The girls that surround him giggle behind their palms, and when they pass Taemin’s seat at the table, the smell of tea and liquor emanating from them the way their fancy floral perfumes must be meant to, they knock into his chair from behind.

“Oh, we beg your pardon, learnèd teacher,” laughs the courtier. “We mean no offense.” He raises his hands to his face as if to try and pardon his own shame, but the apology does not quite reach his eyes.

Disingenuity. Taemin knows it well.

He bears this only for Jongin, does not sneak into their bedrooms at night and cut their throats because he knows he will be dragged away in chains for murder. Still, when he closes his eyes, he can see pale, unmarred flesh beneath his hands, beneath the perfect edge of his blade, as he sits upon the chest of the rumour-mongering courtier who has dared disrespect him just shy of his own face. 

It is a thought that calms him, despite his lack of interest in violence.

In his dreams he plucks every gaudy and besparkled signet ring from those beautiful hands and swallows them down until he feels them plunk in the pit of his stomach. Though the monarchy is more than free to take his will, his head, and his liberty, the one thing they will not strip him of is his pride.

///

Summer sets in, and with the heat come fickle friends.

Yukhei visits him first, once the rumours are more than laughter in a mostly-empty dining hall.

He’s all bedraggled, sweat pouring down his throat, pooling hastily in the divot of his clavicle. Perhaps Ten had been onto something, pointing out this suckling thing to Taemin, once upon a time, and perhaps Taemin had been more the fool not to investigate further. Certainly a member of the Royal Guard is far less dangerous than its deity. “Is it true?” There is a frantic note of concern in his voice, in his eyes, their mahogany depths searching Taemin’s face.

Taemin, more often than not in his cups these days, can only stare up into Yukhei’s face mutely, bottom lip trapped beneath top teeth. When he tips his head at last, quizzical without questioning, Yukhei’s shoulders sag.

“You’re going to be killed,” he says in a stage whisper, flapping his arms.

How things have changed -- from the guard who had once barely tolerated Taemin’s antics to someone careless enough to care for him. 

“I know,” says Taemin, once, and then again, in a broken moan. The pub around him seems to move in a trickle, frozen despite the humidity that lives under everyone’s chin and clothes these days. He rests his head on the long table, ignoring the splinter that pricks just between his brows. “I know and I can’t do anything about it.”

There is something disgustingly sympathetic in the way Yukhei takes a seat across from him, unbidden. “There’s still time for you to undo it,” he whispers, threading his enormous, calloused hand through Taemin’s hair only to scritch gently at his nape. Comfort, Taemin thinks. He is so rarely afforded this when he is worried about his head and Jongin’s heart in the same thought, which is to say _all the time_. “Just tell him you can’t see him anymore. It’s that simple.”

If it were.

Taemin lifts his head just a fraction, just enough that he might look Yukhei in the eye, brows knitted together around that gods-damned splinter digging into his tender flesh. “I can’t.”

“Why not?!” Yukhei’s hand rests heavy against the spot where Taemin’s neck meets the softened reverse zenith between his shoulderblades. “Don’t you care about what happens to you?” The unspoken sentiment between them -- _Don’t you care about those you leave behind?_ \-- is too tender for Taemin to bear, and he waits for Yukhei to speak again, present some point he hasn’t yet made, that Taemin hasn’t yet conceived for himself.

He doesn’t. He would be just as ruined in this situation.

So instead, Taemin forces a smile, props his chin on the backs of his hands. “Don’t worry about me, hm?” he suggests, in that way he reserves for particularly delicate targets. “I’ll be just fine no matter what happens.”

In his eyes Yukhei has his doubts, but he says nothing, instead flagging down the serving girl and asking her for “several rounds in advance,” pressing several coins into her palm. As she scurries away Taemin must think that he’s never seen Yukhei in the tavern, that the drinking nights only belong to him and--

“Have you spoken with Ten?” Yukhei is far too good at reading a room.

Taemin shakes his head. “It’s funny, he was so involved with what I was or wasn’t going to do before, but now--”

“Now what?” comes a too-sharp voice from behind him.

Yukhei ducks behind his hands. Taemin is grateful he cannot see his friend.

With Ten, when Taemin at last turns, the heat of paired gazes too much for him to handle, is a slight little man with eyebrows too thick and hands made entirely of veins. Through his eyebrow is a scar that glints with metal and catches prettily in the light. Ten, too, looks well, an arm wrapped around his companion’s waist and tugging him down to take the bench seats just to Taemin’s right. “We have to talk immediately,” Ten says before he’s even settled in. “You got extra drinks, didn’t you?”

Yukhei nods, visibly numb, halfway raising his hand when another waitress skitters, by nervously avoiding her eyes. 

“Good. Taemin, darling,” and here Ten curls his fingers around Taemin’s wrist, tugging at his arm the way he used to do back when they were still flirting their way around one another, “you know you’re an _absolute_ fool, don’t you?”

“You don’t have to remind me,” murmurs Taemin darkly as a drink is set before him. He is long past caring what it is, and whatever pours down his throat when he chokes it down burns like hellfire. “I’m being reminded _constantly_.”

“Oh, I know,” and there is something dark and sinister to Ten’s tone, something that he probably does not even know is there -- a command, unspoken. “You’re going to talk to my new friend and he’s going to tell you exactly what’s about to happen to you if you don’t _stop_ this stupidity right this instant.”

That fae blood. Taemin shivers under the order. He would stop if he could, he thinks, wrongly. 

Ten’s friend has thus far been quiet, contemplative, ringed fingers tented beneath his chin and elbows on the table like some boorish swine. His brows are knotted firmly together and he appears to be muttering something under his breath. Taemin can’t remember seeing him amidst the veritable parade of men that Ten has slept with during his tenure. In fact, he cannot remember seeing him at all -- not in passing in the halls, nor at the various breakfasts he’s taken amongst the nobility, nor at the ball.

“Who are you?” Taemin asks, leaning forward on one elbow and tracing the tip of his pointer finger along the stark blue veins inside the stranger’s wrist.

“Taeyong,” coughs the stranger, and then again, visibly surprised by the intimacy, and goading under which he’s found himself. Taemin must wonder if perhaps Ten’s glamour works on everyone as opposed to just himself. “My cousin was the last one to be the Prince’s bedfellow before you came along.”

Cousin? Low-ranking, then, to have family at court. It would explain the rings. It would explain quite a few things. Chief among them is Ten’s interest in seeking him out and dragging him to a friends-only event.

Overhead, the music strikes, and Taemin feels like dancing, singing, anything to get him out of this conversation. Far be it from him to wonder what happens to him when all this finally crashes down around him.

In spite of himself, he asks, “Who was your cousin?” And then, more to the point: “What happened to him?”

Taeyong takes a deep breath, then another. Then he drinks, the strong alcohol visibly burning through him as it had Taemin himself. “Sorry, I just,” and he sighs out a breath that had been caught in his throat, bobbing heavily, “I’ve been paid not to speak of this. Handsomely, at that.”

“To speak of what?” Yukhei, too, is interested. There’s a bit of red rimming his eyes. Emotion? Exhaustion? Perhaps both? A curse bestowed upon him by some unknowing faerie in their midst? Taemin does not feel like unpacking that one, not now, not when he’s hanging on Taeyong’s every word.

“To speak of what happened with my cousin.” He pauses, glances around, lowers his voice so that Taemin has to strain to hear him over the babbling tune the band has struck up. Around them people gather for dances of their own; their elbows find shoulders, their hips the smalls of backs, and every so often one of their gathered party will _oof_ out his discomfort as he leans in to listen. “You see… well, he was always fond of the Prince. Pretty boys in general. I always told him they’d be his downfall, and he never listened.”

Ten gives Taemin a pointed look, which Taemin thusly ignores. “Why didn’t he?”

Taeyong lifts his shoulders, and the next words come out defeated. “Why aren’t you?” Taemin opens his mouth to protest only to be shushed with a hand against the upper plane of his abdomen, the palm hot even through his leathers. He shoots Ten a glare and mouths _I can control myself_ , though the vow falls on blind eyes. “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. What matters now is that my cousin...”

And here, Taeyong trembles. Ten coos out a halfhearted comfort, no good at making people feel better when he’s the one who made them feel worse. He brackets Taeyong’s hands between his palms and kisses the soft spot of his temple, hidden behind jet-black hair. “It’s okay. He’s okay.”

“They banished him,” wails Taeyong, only to be shushed again. “They sent him to some nowhere coast and stripped him of land and titles, and where he went there’s nothing but bandits and thieves and whores and--”

Yukhei sucks in a breath, eyes wide, fingers knotting together anxiously. To him, this must be a fate worse than death. He knows nothing of finality. Taemin cannot help but hate him a little for it.

“That’s enough, dear love,” murmurs Ten, dusting another kiss to the high, damp apple of Taeyong’s cheek. “Go get yourself something to drink, hm? It’s on me.” He tucks a coin into Taeyong’s cloak pocket, though how he could have found that pocket Taemin has no idea; it is invisible to even Taemin’s well-trained eyes. Perhaps he’s been inside it.

When Taeyong totters away, still crying as he makes his way to the bar, Taemin gives Ten a look of great reproach. “Whatever was all that for?” he demands. “To tell me that I’ve got it good here and I’ve no reason to fuck around with someone who’ll get me _banished_?” Here he rolls his eyes for good measure, so hard he swears he sees the inside of his skull. “Certainly you can do worse than tell me I’ll finally get to leave this shithole kingdom--”

Appalled, Yukhei dips his head to bury his face in his hands.

Ten rears up, every inch the snake Taemin is purported to be, and narrows his eyes to mere slits. “That is the story they will tell us,” he says in a hiss, tongue darting out across his lips. “Those few you leave behind will simply think you gone, disappeared one night into the darkness never to return. But what Taeyong won’t tell you -- won’t tell _anyone_ \-- is that his cousin has yet to return any of his letters. That he has his cousin’s family crest tucked in a box that someone has left in his bedroom. That when he dreams he will dream of his cousin’s head rolling neatly into a basket prepared to catch it.” He swallows all the rest of his ire with the liquor in his flask. “I understand,” he says softly, dragging the back of his hand across his now-wet mouth, “not wanting to do this for yourself. But I have grown to care for you, assassin, and I will not be embarrassed for circumstances beyond my control.”

It is cold, and cruel, and precisely what Taemin does not need to hear. Not from the one person he’d trusted with his thoughts almost as much as Jongin himself.

The dance floor has cleared out, dusty footprints left in the wake of couples too drunk to care that the soles of their boots are dirtied. In an instant, Taemin thinks of what little he will be leaving behind.

“I’ll stop,” he lies through gritted teeth. He drains the remainder of his too-strong liquor and slams the flagon down on the table. “For you, Ten, my one friend--” across the table, Yukhei squawks out some indignant sound, “for you I will stop. And no one else.”

Though he can think of no way to become more private -- after all, they’d been caught of accord not their own -- he knows better than to cross someone like Ten, someone slippery enough to do something about the betrayal if given the chance.

He knows, now, that there is only one option. Though it weighs upon his heart to do so, Taemin knows that he must leave before they have the chance to drag him away.

He presses traitor’s kisses to Ten’s face, and bids him a good evening, his shoulders barely darkening the doorway on his way out.

///

His things stay packed up for days, _weeks_ as he waits for his opportunity to leave. He tells no one his plan, and there is enough evidence of his having been here to ease the mind of anyone who might think him kidnapped. Banished, as it were. He scoffs mildly at the thought -- his presence, once so big and imposing, cannot be erased by material possessions alone. At least, so he believes as he’s tucking jewelry given him by his Prince into the lining of his cloak, should anyone decide to search him on the road.

He’s decided against keeping the various books that Jongin has allowed him to use over their time together, thinking only that they will trip him as he makes the mad sprint south. It’s fine. He can relearn all he knows once he is home safely.

Home. He can go home, if only he leaves in time.

Still, his heart aches at the notion of home, if only because home should be wherever he can be in the arms of his Prince.

Jongin tries to visit several times, against both their better judgment. He lingers long at Taemin’s door, until the sun begins to rise against a purple dawn. Its golden inflection bars slowly across the bedroom floor. He writes letters that Taemin does not read before throwing into the fire.

The thing that Taemin has come to know about scar tissue is that it takes a great deal of pain and discomfort before the wound truly heals over. He has, in his time, watched various injuries turn a sickly shade of yellow, have to be slapped with leaves full of poultice and salve and magical things that bear no name before they get better. 

He, too, will heal. No matter how badly it hurts to hear Jongin’s pitiful moaning outside his door, to feel his fists beat against the back side of Taemin’s bedchamber door in perfect rhythm with Taemin’s own broken heart, he will survive, and he will tend to his wounds by whatever means necessary as soon as he is home, and safe.

Some nagging voice in the back of Taemin’s head asks him, as he’s bundling together a list of the letters Jongin had written him all those ages ago, _What is home if you are alone in it?_ He laughs, bitter and endangered, and thinks of Taeyong’s weeping face, of the sharpness of Ten’s cheekbones, of the worry in young Yukhei’s eyes.

Home is nothing, he tells himself, if he worries the people who have come to make it so. Home cannot exist without a body and heart inside it. Home is simply a notion for sickly fools if those fools do not make it for themselves.

Taemin will make it for himself. The money he’s gently socked away from the royal coffers, tucked into the toes of his boots, the myriad pockets lining the inside of his cloak, will assure that for him, even if he can guarantee for himself absolutely nothing else. 

The bruises he had obtained through practise have started to yellow, to fade out at last. It has been a long, long time since he first bore the marks of some insufferable brat.

When he is alone, truly alone, Taemin sinks to his knees in the center of his bedroom floor and cries out to his ill-begotten gods, that they might deliver him in his time of need. 

If they are listening, the fox and the hound and the raven, they do not answer.

///

In the middle of the night, there is a polite knocking on the door.

Taemin has just convinced himself to put out the fire in the hearth, watched it crackle with documents he has acquired over the months only to die beneath the water he’d heaped upon it. He is curled up, infinitesimal beneath his blankets, which only serve to make him sweat in the summer heat that pilfers in through the open windows. He finds that, in the smoky air, he has difficulty breathing that he’s never experienced before.

The knock comes again, a bit firmer this time. _Knock, knock, knock._ Rapid succession. A demand. For a moment it sounds like Jongin, the sound reserved for their rendezvous. The time of night is right. 

Taemin is a weak man, given to temptation in ways that gods and kings are not. He has denied himself so much these last few weeks, cutting off contact entirely. He has read no letters, taken no books, given no inkling that he wants anything but for their tryst to end.

Moreover, he is leaving tomorrow, and when he closes his eyes and thinks of home, his renegade heart beats out the stuttering of Jongin’s breath. 

How well he knows his lover.

So he throws back the covers, and pads across the floor to open the bedroom door, allow Jongin entry into his space once more, and reassure him though they might not be together, that Taemin will always care for his god-prince.

It is not Jongin who waits behind the door, when Taemin flings it open. In fact, it is the absolute jester who had thought to laugh about Taemin’s plight in the dining hall, when the rumours had first started.

“Good evening, esteemed teacher and fellow,” says the man congenially through the crack Taemin has made in the door. “It seems there is a warrant for your arrest.” He is smiling as if he bears good news, and perhaps for himself he does. After all, he’s made it a life’s calling to make Taemin as miserable as possible. The gleam of his pretty canines in the low light of early morning would tell anyone how greatly he enjoys partaking in causing sufferance. “I trust that you will come quietly?”

Through everything, Taemin has remained dignified -- even in his love, professèd and bold -- but looking at this smirking fool, this sorry excuse for a man, he must admit his stores are running low.

He flings the door open with one hand. With the other he takes the man by the throat and drags him into his bedchamber. He had not, through the crack he’d opened the door, seen the guards in their uniforms. Nor does he care. His vision goes white. He throws this man to the floor and perches upon his chest. His hands wrap around that bejeweled throat and squeeze tight enough to relieve the tension.

The man gets off a half-squawk of fear and indignation before his airway is cut off.

Taemin may know many ways to kill a man, his beloved knives his pride and joy, but sometimes the old-fashioned way is best.

When the guards -- one of them the child, his companion upon being dragged here, though he isn’t so conscious of that as he will be soon -- pry him from his victim, Taemin is screaming in a voice that he can only hear at a distance. His throat threatens to split. Somewhere across the room a nobleman is rubbing at the swell of his own throat and whining about bruises. He casts his wicked gaze upon Taemin, and there is evil that rushes through Taemin’s blood.

With an elbow, he knocks free of the one guard, leaving one to grasp him by the upper arm. The one that holds on is the child, who only whispers plaintively, “That’s quite enough.”

Taemin tastes blood at the back of his throat. He stops mid-lunge, his closed fist blooming into aching fingers that still bear the memory of the last time he’d seen the Prince.

He had been leaving tomorrow. It is the only thing his head will tell him.

He lets them drag him away, defiant spirit dampened by his own tears as they stream silent down his face.

///

The dungeon reeks of mildew. The hay bedding they layer across the floor is scratchy against his scars. The bread they ration to him is spotted with mold. As he sips at some hot water they claim is meant to approximate soup, he thinks that they are tearing apart his room for some evidence that he had been doing what they said. He knows how these games are played. If they find nothing -- and they won’t, save the books that he could have just as easily found of his own accord -- they will manufacture something.

Taemin knows all this, and does nothing. His gaoler watches him eat the way a bird might watch a mouse titter its way through the fields. When his food -- what can be eaten of it, which is very little -- is finished with, the bastard with the keys snatches the remnants, feeds them to the rats that skitter beneath the stone floor, puddling in the cracks impatiently as they await their wretched dinner.

“Would you speak with me?” Taemin asks. The one way to drive a man mad is to isolate him from any fellows he might have. “Please.” His courtly manners have not left him, despite not knowing how many days he has been kept here, if it has even been days at all. Every minute passes like a lifetime, and his skin and heart are growing damper by the minute.

The gaoler does not answer. Instead he sits in his pathetically ricketing wicker chair, his arms folded across his chest, and pretends to go to sleep.

He is thinking of escape.

There are no other prisoners here, but there is a suspiciously young-looking body in an adjacent cell. The blood that stains the hay has long since browned with age and air, but Taemin curiously peers between the bars anyway.

He is no physician, but he would say that the madness got to him before any of the food ever could, judging by the crater in the back of the summertime boy’s skull.

He cannot even be angry, though there is something that ignites inside him when he surveys the corpse, realises that the smell of rot cannot simply be the bedding but the decomposition of a body. He was warned that this is what his fate might have been. 

Eternities pass here, only he and his guard and his brother-in-arms. The only sound is that of ragged breathing, the pounding of his heart. He wants to leave, he wants to dig through the earth, he wants to cut his own throat if it means retaining what little dignity he had managed to cobble together in his time here--

And then, the Prince’s face comes to his mind, unbidden. Jongin. His love, his home. The man who had written him letters and given him the opportunity to prove himself before anyone else had. The man who tasted of honey and a rage that spoke to generations’ worth of disappointment, who fell apart as soon as Taemin spoke his native tongue. The king-to-be, king and gentle and generous and forgiving, who will be a beloved ruler but ultimately not a good one.

He would hurt, should Taemin take his own life. He will hurt regardless, but the least Taemin can do for ignoring him all this time, for making him wait for something they could have shared all along, is protect him from this cruelty, this one final thing.

However long Taemin is gone, Jongin does not see him. Perhaps he cannot. Taemin imagines the stern lectures of the king while he draws his knees up beneath his chin, his greying spittle flying and his face emaciated despite the enormous swelling of his belly. Perhaps he is being confined, just as Taemin is.

The shared fate is something that warms him despite the coldness of this dungeon, and Taemin must admit that he would like to go back in time, share more, tell the past version of himself not to stall quite so hard when something good had been upon him.

He presses into bruises and thinks, strangely fond, of each one Jongin had given him, each lesson they had taken, each time they’d made love under the watchful eyes of long-dead kings. His knees bear faint scars, though he can’t see them now. His belly tingles with the memory of Jongin’s mouth on the oldest scar on his person, and he can see when he closes his eyes the admiring gaze with which he’d been met upon explaining it.

He misses. Gods, but he misses, even without cause, even without provocation, even without there being any sense to it. Should he have to miss his head or miss his Prince -- well, he’d let his head roll all over again without a second thought.

When things settle and the guard snores, breaking the quiet, Taemin speaks. He recites a poem written by a god, given to man as a gift. His foreign tongue grants him privacy he has not been granted in this castle even a single time.

_My raven king,_ he says to himself, careful with words that are not his own. _My love, my home, my everything under the sun. I dread the day you rebuff me at last, and know that I am not deserving of the gift of your heart._ His eyes well up with silent tears, the words falling flat in his own voice and in the light of recent circumstances. Still, he keeps on, desperate for comfort, for company, no longer accustomed to being alone. _I know that it is no small thing for you to give yourself to me as you have, and I thank whatever gods you believe in that they granted me your mercy. That they granted me you. Everything I am, and everything I will be upon taking that cursèd king’s crown upon my head, is because of you. You came and taught me about fighting, about caring for more people than myself, about what it means to love unselfishly. And should they try and take that lesson from me, I will fight._

He takes a shaking breath, chest hollow with the expulsions of words. _After all, every gift you give me is worth fighting for. I love you, raven king, prince of shadows and darkness._

Eventually the dungeon door flings open, interrupting his monologue. Someone is there to see him,it seems. The gaoler rises to his feet and tries to stop the intruder, but the man there with intent is his superior, and raises a hand to stop him. It is Ten, his back bowed in a way that Taemin has never seen and cannot say he likes. His eyes, usually a shade of obsidian, glimmer an otherworldly shade of amethyst when he stoops to meet Taemin’s eye.

Never one to refuse polite company, Taemin drags himself across the floor, fits his fingers around the bars keeping him in place, admiring the way they frame Ten’s features despite himself. It is, after all, so much easier to focus on the fact that he might offend his friend than the fact that he might die.

“What are they saying up there?” he asks, voice low, conspiracy clear in the way he lowers his head to look up into Ten’s face. “Is everyone alright? Are you alright?”

“Do I _look_ alright?” Ten sounds as exhausted as the bags forming beneath his eyes might imply. At least his sense of sarcasm has not dwindled any. He reaches between the bars, takes Taemin’s face into his hands, stares down the planes of his face as if waiting for some change that is never going to come. “They’re going to execute you,” he says at last, bitter. “I tried to warn you.”

“I was going to leave,” says Taemin, knowing he should appear the bereft prisoner but not having it in him for an act. Not when his resolve is so strong, not when he is so convicted in his rightness, not when he’s got the image of home twinkling bright behind his eyes. “I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

“I know,” murmurs Ten, gentle in spite of his own resolution. “I know what you did, my love, and I would have done anything to undo it had I known sooner this was what you’d been up to.”

Taemin laughs, a harsh sound that echoes against the decrepit walls of the room meant to be his tomb. “I wouldn’t have told you if you’d asked, _because_ you would have undone me.” He pauses, glances at the corpse in the cell adjacent his own. “He didn’t get the mercy of seeing himself beheaded.”

“That’s because he was someone,” says Ten, softly, sadly, thumbs passing over the hollows beneath Taemin’s eyes. “You are nothing to these people.”

Taemin takes this in silently, bottom lip bleeding beneath his teeth as they continue to dig it raw. “Is it too late to take up with Yukhei instead?” he asks, half a joke, though his voice cracks on the delivery.

Ten laughs, too, a hollow sound. He threads his fingers through the muss of Taemin’s hair, plucking a strand of straw from it to flick it away. “You stupid, stupid fool.” And then, something settles over him, some stillness that bears no name save the supernatural. “Is it worth it? Loving someone despite your fears?”

Taemin nods, and drapes his hand over Ten’s. “It is worth everything.”

It is the steadiest declaration he has ever made.


	8. 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He will not grovel at the feet of any royal save his own, the one to whom he’d sworn fealty when only darkness had been listening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's the end guys the END  
> please mind in particular the character death tag  
> i promised someone that there was no Major character death and while that still applies please be mindful nonetheless

The first time he sees the sun after being arrested, Taemin breaks into tears at the sight of something so beautiful. In the courtyard between his prison and his final resting place, the birds sing a chirpy song. It reminds Taemin of all the good things that have happened to him since coming here, of the friends that will mourn their loss, the lover that will languish at his side even after they throw his body into some nameless pit.

They take him from his cell, and he does not let his feet drag, strength imbued unto him in a way that he cannot name. Today, he bears no sorrow, harbours no regret. Today, he is going to be sentenced to death.

When at last he thinks to raise his head, face the light that has been so blessedly given him, he sees the King perched upon his throne. Taemin does not know that he even looks at the paunchy man in the ill-fitting robes, instead seeking out the throne just to the right. Jongin sits there upon it, a departure from the man Taemin had met not quite as long ago as his aching body insists it had been. Now, instead of bored and arrogant, he watches with rapt, worried attention, his fingers tented beneath his chin and his elbows upon his knees. His dress is plain, appropriate for court, but in the wrong colour. Today, he wears all black, a mourning widow’s garb.

He looks as if he hasn’t slept in a century. Perhaps it has been that long, since he had joined Taemin in bed, whispered every beauty into his skin as they drifted off with the violet rising of the sun.

“Traitor,” greets the King, surprisingly amiable. It must do his heart good, to know that a snake will die. “Would you like to hear the charges laid against you?”

Taemin says nothing, though his lips twitch upward, nose drawing into a vague semblance of a sneer. 

The King delights in the lack of answer, and presses forward. The crowd, deathly silent, breaks into sporadic whispers the likes of which Taemin cannot decipher. “You are charged with adultery,” begins His Majesty. “Conspiracy. Threatening the crown. Defiling a sacred sanctuary of His Majesty the King and All His Ancestors. Heresy, blasphemy.” He sniffs, and the rattle of his chest when he exhales tells Taemin that this will likely be his last major act as ruler. He delights in the prospect of this ancient bastard’s death. “You are an enemy of the state and a danger to the monarchy as it stands right now. Furthermore, you have already proven that you intend to do harm to me, and those closest to me, those in charge of governing this realm; this much has been established upon your arrival to our blessèd court.” He lifts his head, fighting the slip of his heavy crown. “Do you deny these charges?”

“No,” responds Taemin, without a moment’s hesitation.

He does not miss the disappointed wrinkle in Jongin’s brow, upon his pronouncement. He will not grovel at the feet of any royal save his own, the one to whom he’d sworn fealty when only darkness had been listening.

“They’ll have his head!” shouts someone in the gathered throng of onlookers, delighted by the notion of bloodshed. The rest of them, lemmings that they are, agree and throw up their hands in plea. “He deserves to die! Anyone who threatens our land has to go!”

The King raises his hands, forces a hush.

“My son,” and here the King turns to the Prince, a monster despicable and godless, awakening in his dim eyes. “What is your pronouncement, when someone here is a traitor?”

In this moment, Taemin knows that there is no such thing as forgiveness. He knows that no matter what he _wants_ from this, he will have to suffer cruelty to be disappointed in the end.

Jongin’s eyes well up, a familiar sight. Taemin can hear the echoes of his mournful pleas bounding off the inside of his otherwise empty head. He does not think he can bear to see his Prince -- so strong, so inimitable, so unflappable -- cry face to face.

Still, he is the future king. He has a duty to his nation, and such opens his mouth to deliver the sentence, his face a crumble.

Taemin closes his eyes, lowers his head, and prays to the fox and the hound and the raven that they are able to forgive Jongin for what it is he must do.

///

Taemin had known all along that this would be his fate: that he would be led to the gallows, head hung low, stripped of reputation just as easily as they’d taken from him his clothes and weapons. He had fought against fate and lost, and knew all the while that this would be his undoing.

The crowds that had screamed for his death are here, now, waiting with bated breath to see his head roll. To hell with the lot of them, he thinks, shooting daggers at everyone bold enough to meet his eye. They had never once been on his side, and now would be a funny time to start. _Spineless_ , they shout intermittently, _betrayer, traitor, dirt, filth, turncoat, villain, monster_. He pricks his ears to the insults and raises his face to the shining sun, lavishing in every curse, despite the earth and loam and mildew caked to his every bare surface, every inc of his heart and ounce of his spirit that he had allowed to languish in that dilapidated excuse for a temporary home.

On the way he catches no glimpse of Jongin, though he searches every face carefully for a last glimpse of his beloved Prince. It should not surprise him that Jongin is not forced to be here; he had needed to be taken away by a host of royal guards, his thrashing and flailing, his grief too much for him to bear. His screams still echo in Taemin’s head, in his heart, fighting to escape his ribcage.

It aches, to be left pining after someone who would not be permitted to watch him die. After all, he had known this, too, that Jongin would not be the only one suffering for their tryst. It had been stupid of him to hope that, perhaps, he had been the only one who cared.

The crowds breathe in perfect, screaming tandem, a public tired, hungry for blood, and a court to match as they smile behind their hands, their printed fans, their shirtsleeves and gilded collars. Among them is the courtier who had seen his arrest, his pretty hands cupped over his flagitious mouth as he calls for the death of a traitor. The bruises round his throat have purpled so nicely, so sharply against the pale of his perfect faux-royal skin that Taemin swears he can see the ridges of his own fingerprints in the marks. 

Good, he thinks, as the hooded guard jerks on his elbow, still sore from taking out one of this man’s ilk not but a few days before.

His friends are not there guiding him, but it would have been too welcome a respite to be able to say goodbye. He isn’t sure he could look Yukhei or Yangyang or, gods forbid, Ten in the eye when bidding them a morbid farewell.

Here, with his hands roped behind his back, Taemin is devoid of regret. The bonds dig into his skin but he does not feel them; the shouting of the crowd fades into a dull buzz, battled down by the memory that has haunted Taemin since his sentence had been delivered.

The one thing he does regret as he makes his slow, guided path toward the headsman who'll be his end -- the one thing he does want to take back is the time he spent thinking of but not doing, the wasted youth that will soon be ripped from him, instead of given to Jongin, the way he would have if they’d been permitted, if their stations or circumstances had somehow been different.

Still, as the headsman looms before him upon a platform, his ax looking heavy in his hand, there is no sight of the Prince to whom he’d gladly sworn his heart, his future, his life and death and everything in-between. He hopes, for both their sakes, that Jongin does not make himself known at this scene. It would be best that their relationship not end on the memory of his dislodged skull resting, bloodied and stumpy, in a basket.

Morbidly, Taemin thinks of what his reaction might be should their situations be reversed and, with a pounding heart but a clear head, he does not find that he likes it any better.

He is marched up the steps against his own will, slowly, one by one, giving the crowd the show they’d come for. The prayers that he had numbly mumbled before being jerked from his cell had not concerned himself, but rather the soul of the poor young man who had quite likely loved Jongin first. He thinks now about how awful that summer spirit would look strung up or divested of his head.

The headsman indicates with a few gestures where Taemin should lay his throat. The guards force him into that position when he does not indicate his understanding and promptly comply, unable to process the fact that this is his end when all around him is noise, confusion, _chaos_. He grunts under the force of their grip, startled at the suddenness of it all, and tumbles to his knees, knocking his forehead against the chopping block.

He takes a deep breath, and prays to his gods, that they might be kind to him in whatever comes after this, that he might be forgiven for his crimes.

The jeering of the gathered crowd falls silent as the King takes the stage set before them. He peers over his endless flab, down into Taemin’s face. “Do you understand the nature of your crimes?” he asks.

Taemin does not say anything, bites blood from his lip to keep his wretched tongue in check. In his head he runs through the sacraments that have been taught him, a part of him since before he had ever thought of becoming a kingkiller, a murderer, a traitor.

“Do you have any final words?” prompts the King a second time, taking a step back. 

Again, Taemin is silent. The look he gives the monarch standing over him is one of pure reproach, and judging by the one he receives in return, the feeling is mutual.

For one long moment, it is simply the two of them on the stage. That is, until the executioner clears his throat, a low rumble of sound that cuts through the tension.

He rethinks his rescinding of last words, and spits at the King’s feet, “Does it please a god to deny his people happiness?”

The King says nothing, merely shuffles away to stand beside his blade, apparently too cowardly to get blood on his own blessèd hands. Taemin rolls his eyes, and breathes in through his nose, and wishes he were getting away from this place in better circumstances -- but then, escape in a coffin is still escape, he supposes.

The cry of a bird rings out overhead. This courtyard, this place in which he’d first fallen for Jongin’s fighting spirit, if not his attitude, seems a fitting place to die. 

A calm washes over Taemin as he hears the sound of a blade scraping against leather. He thinks, in this moment, of Jongin, of how a homeless orphan boy could one day live beside a prince, of how anyone can make a way in this world.

It calms him.

He closes his eyes, and waits for the spirits to guide him home.

The pain never comes. The end never comes.

Instead, a roar erupts from the crowd, piercing through the silence that they had taken in observance of this vigilante against the crown. Taemin’s skin pinches together, every nerve set afire with anticipation not yet completed. He cracks open one eye. The King no longer stands beside him.

Taemin raises his head, and glances just to his left, only to see the axeman with an arrow through his chest, and the King with a blade in his oversized gut, spilling with gore that almost makes Taemin dizzy to see. He clutches at his mouth to keep the bile rising in his throat from revolting against him.

The arrow has a scroll wrapped around its shaft. In this stampeding of people he has a moment to snatch it from the tie that binds it.

On it is written a single word, in a language Taemin knows too well, scrawled in a too-familiar hand.

_Run._

He gazes out for a long moment, watches a small man be trampled beneath the feet of his fellow onlookers, rioting as their god bleeds to death upon his own stage of execution. Blood pours from his mouth even as he sags under his own weight, doubling in on himself, his glut becoming slacker with each second that ticks by.

Then Taemin does the one thing he knows how to do.

He runs.

It would be simple to say that he uses all the grace afforded him by his profession to avoid the press of bodies that tries to stop him. But Taemin, for all the supposed grace he has learned, all the quick footwork and careful study he’s done over the years, does not have any good way of escaping anything, least of all grabbing hands, tripping feet, a sea of bodies hell-bent on stopping him for no reason other than his end should have been his own. So instead, he draws his knife. He cuts the skin of anyone who comes near him, the screams becoming dull background to his ears as he listens for any indication that someone who can outdo him might be nearby.

In the end, he is cornered by the fool duke who had placed him under arrest.

They stand opposite one another, weathering the knocking elbows and tripping feet as sturdy buildings do storms. Taemin had not expected the skinny little thing to bring a weapon of any kind, but from his sashed waist he draws a hunter’s knife. He raises his arm, pointing the blade in Taemin’s direction.

He charges, spurred on by the brunt of bodies pushing him to do so, his eyes wild with a manic fear that has no depth. He is a man willing to die for something in which he believes.

For a flash, Taemin envies him. But then the training of years takes over, and his dagger is in his hand before he registers it.

He would be wrong in saying he does not take pleasure in abandoning his favourite weapon if it means plunging it into the man’s throat, watching over his shoulder upon his expedient retreat the way in which the man staggers to his knees, trying to scream only to find that he cannot. The marks of Taemin’s fingerprints run over with blood, disappearing entirely beneath a river of crimson that gushes down his neck and into the many gold chains he wears over his heart. 

Still, Taemin does not stop moving, not even for a moment, not even when he thinks he hears familiar voices asking him to stop, to stay, to face his punishment like a man and not a coward. Not even the love of his life could get him to stay here, not when death has given him a second chance at survival.

Outside the castle’s perimeter, long after any guards have stopped pursuing him, Taemin finds a broken-down stable, smelling of dusty hay and long-forgotten dung. He breathes it in. It rings to him of safety, of freedom never afforded him before. There is a stallion awaiting him, a packed bag tied to its saddle. He presses a palm to its flank; the muscle there is still warm, humming with exertion.

His lungs ache. His head spins. How had anyone known what direction he’d take upon fleeing, when Taemin himself had not known? Had they stocked all the castle’s outposts with a way for him to flee to safety? It matters little. For now all he can do is force himself to get up on the horse’s back, his muscles screaming with the added strain. He ignores the continuous gnawing of his chafed-raw thighs and squeezes them to the horse’s sides.

Overhead, the sun has begun to dim. Has it been so long of running? He’s lost track of time.

Deliriously he tucks his face against the horse’s neck, arms fitting round it as he breathes in the scent of an unkempt mane, drinking in the sensation of being _alive_. When at long last he is able to understand that he has survived, Taemin does the only thing he can do.

He throws his head back and laughs, so bright and happy and hysterical that he almost startles at the sound of his own voice.

Then he guides the horse south. Home.

///

It takes months before they find him.

Months of scrounging on familiar and unfamiliar streets. Home, precious and beloved, has changed so much since he was a child, though not all for the worse. The streets are prettier and cleaner than he remembers. The serving girls in the tavern into which he first steps foot are far kinder than the ones who had told him off for looking for scraps in the trash at the end of the night. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he’s no longer the skin-and-bones orphan boy that he had been, or perhaps it has to do with the King’s gold that he presses into their hands.

He is far fonder now of home than he could have been as a child, and he expresses his gratitude and leaves it at that.

The dilapidated home in which he’d been raised, crowded with filthy young bodies desperate to escape and headed by a crooked-necked pair of elderly priests of the old ways, no longer stands as it was. Instead it has been knocked down, built over with a shrine to the northerly human gods.

Irony, Taemin tells himself, tasting acid at the back of his throat but keeping it down for old times’ sake.

He finds an inn at which to stay, and instead of killing -- gods know he has no business attracting the attention his old profession would bring him, and anyway he’s quite sick of the notion of death. He pays his room’s rent by helping out around the old neighbourhoods. He dresses wounds and slapping poultices he buys from the local apothecary. He fixes the doors of old widows who won’t be safe without, and who thank him by keeping him fed even when he does not work for them. He teaches songs that he’s learned throughout his travels to the local children, who clap their hands and trill with delight whenever they hear him sing. His hands and heart have gotten quite skilled, and he’s watched a god show mercy so many times that it must have changed him. 

Every day he thinks of Jongin. Every day his heart beats proud with the notion that he would gladly have died for love. Some nights, when he’s feeling particularly lonely, he replays their practises, the evenings they spent avoiding kissing one another, their first time in a chapel where gods could see.

He thinks he would die still, if it meant he got the chance to be by his sun prince’s side once more. When he dreams it is of hands that are too soft by far, and of eyes that burn with a passion that only love makes.

They do find him, though, in the end. It is difficult not to know everyone by name in this town, and his reputation precedes him, much to his great misfortune. No one visits him in person, but instead his dearest friend writes him a letter.

_Dear snake,_ it reads in a steady hand, and Taemin smiles so big that he swears he’ll split his face in two.

Ten writes that he’s settled down with that well-browed, humble man from the tavern, the one with which Taemin watched him escape to dally most often. He writes that Yukhei is getting on well, and has been promoted quickly in a time of great chaos and confusion for everyone. He writes about every gossip he’s heard. How the courtier responsible for Taemin’s arrest -- Baekhyun, Taemin learns his name is -- had been exposed for doing some dealings against the kingdom himself. There are those who speak with sideways mouths when they talk about the duke’s passing, of the war into which the crown could have been plunged had he been allowed to get any further in his wicked games.

He writes that people care where Taemin is, but only people who do not matter, people whose power has waned under a new regime. This brings relief that Taemin had not known he’d needed; a weight lifts off his chest, one to which he’d become so accustomed to carrying that it cracks his aching bones.

He apologises for not informing Taemin of his plan sooner, though he makes it clear that something -- someone -- had kept him from doing so. _It would have been unsafe to let you in on it._ Taemin can hear the smirk in his voice, see the twinkle in his eyes, and misses his friend so dearly that his insides start to thrum with an emotion he thought he’d long since killed. _And anyway, your line about gods denying happiness was too good to be wasted. You know I love a bit of theatre._

On the last page, Ten writes of Jongin, just a little. Just enough that it hurts. _Our new king is faring well,_ he says. _They say he will be a different sort of monarch, one who wants his people to love him rather than simply worship him. They also say that his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. They think he misses someone, and that being alone has hurt his heart too deeply for him to give it to the crown as he should._

Taemin clutches the letter to his chest and cries until there is no more feeling left to any of him, knowing he cannot write back. His jellied heart screams at him to go back to what he knows, that no one cares what he’s done when the wretched king no longer beats at his door. 

He knows better. The letters will not stop coming, and soon they will arrive in the hands of arm guards with blades pointed at his throat rather than on the good will of some unnamed messenger dove. It is unsafe.

In the night, he packs his things, and leaves on time, thanking the innkeeper who’s kindly taken care of him this long for doing so well by him. His mortal possessions fit on his back in a small leather satchel. His horse is waiting in the stable, well-fed and rested in this time of relearning to be a human outside of court.

The keep just smiles, and fills a skin with Taemin’s usual spiced wine, and presses it to Taemin’s gut. “For the road,” he says, glimmering brightly in the candlelight. “For your safety and peace of mind. And for helping everyone you’ve helped here.” He continues polishing the wood of his bar, smiling at his reflection in the gleaming surface. “Come back if you ever need anything.”

He will not come back and knows it too well, but nods his agreement as he slips out the door. In a moment of weakness, he considers the kindness of others, and how he cannot afford to do the same for them in return.

The wood just to the south of town welcomes him with open arms, and he thinks of his Prince, and however he will find his raven king once he flies away for good.

///

The sea is twice as beautiful as he remembers, and glimmers sapphire against the beaming sunlight. Its swells and ebbs and flows crash into the home he’s built himself. This is what he tells himself as he gazes out the open window into its unforgiving surface, calm for now but certain to rear up again this evening when the storm that’s been threatening all day finally blows in.

His skin is darker with the sun, now, his hair threaded through with gold that he’s never had before. He doesn’t know that anyone would recognise him. Though it is foolish to think anyone might be looking, he hopes that if someone does find him, they mistake him for some poor fisherman’s son.

The waves lap softly at the shore the way a kitten might lap at its owner’s fingertips, a plea for attention. Taemin does not have much time before the rain begins. It is with this in mind that he makes his way out of his home, down the shoreline path to the village just west of where he’d set up camp some many months -- nay, years -- before.

As he does every day, he whispers to himself one of the letters he had carved into his own heart. Today it is a filthy one. He thinks about bringing one of the fishery boys home with him, drinking in the scent of their briny skin as he invites them inside him, sheepish at the intrusion but welcoming all the same. He only thinks, never does; it’s an idle curiosity of his that does not get fulfilled. In the end, he always goes home alone.

It is better this way, he thinks, a touch mournful. Being alone has always been an assassin’s fate. He has no right to think he might be different than the rest.

If he is doing this because a sun god reigns in his sky alone, then it is his own business and no one else’s.

The fishmongers and stall barkers catch his ear before anything, and he buys provisions for himself to eat for a few days, just in case the weather is worse than initially anticipated. Though he’s long since run out of a foreign king’s gold, he helps out around the docks, fixing things, taking care of troublesome caravans that threaten to drive up the prices of local goods.

He has learned to be helpful, and that this keeps the aching memories away.

It is when he is purchasing the last of a fresh catch of sunshore eels that he hears the local gossips’ too-loud conversation, sat at a table for the only restaurant in the area, a little hut with barely any cover on its roof despite Taemin’s efforts to fix it. They play dice, drink, smoke, and make merry -- a time-honoured tradition, one they’ve been keeping since Taemin came in like the tide all too long ago. Taemin can’t help but listen in -- his ears, after all, are still attuned to whispers. Old habits dying hard, he figures, by way of excusing himself eavesdropping. “Did you hear they lost the king?” asks one rum-drunk man as he shakes dice in a cup.

“Oh, that’s not true,” says another, rolled tobacco poking out from between his stubbled lips. “It’s nearly impossible to lose something that jingles quite so loud, don’t you think?”

“No, they were bringing him southward, to treat the pox that has befallen that kingdom,” insists the first man. He casts his dice and apparently loses, though the wincing of failure does not interrupt the flow of conversation. “They wanted to see the southerly witches and find out if there was anything they could do.” He snorts into his bottle. “Isn’t that king supposed to be a god? Who knew gods could come down with a common case of the pox?”

“Ah, but it isn’t a common pox,” argues the smoking man, drawing up his knee beneath his chin as he takes his turn at rolling dice. “It’s a pestilence rained down upon them by the true gods of the south for their arrogance.” He puffs at his tobacco impatiently as he rolls his dice, takes two and counts the points they bring him aloud. “Still, I don’t know that a king could be lost, not when he’s got an entire company of guard with him.”

Taemin does not have to wonder, and the thought of his Prince -- now a King, he supposes -- lost among the wilderness, alone and without his coterie in tow, is one that sets his bones to shuddering and his heart to hurting in a way that he did not think he could still feel. He stops on the way out of the market, purchases several bottles of liquor.

At least this way he can grieve and be done with it, he supposes, intent upon cooking himself a dinner and drinking himself into oblivion. The girl who takes his coin and curried favour does not give him reproach. He must wonder when this became such a habit that no one looks at him askance for it anymore. 

The path back home is a longer one, when one’s heart is heavy and one no longer wishes to keep themselves company by the memorial word of another lost long ago. It is impertinent of him to entertain the notion of seaside lovers, but without it he has nothing. He pops the cork on one bottle and is slightly dizzy by the time he reaches his shack again.

The door is open. He does not remember opening the door. All at once his senses return to him. His knives are inside, hidden in case of need. He has not needed them much since coming to the sea. He is defenseless, his only weapon some eels that need drying and a half-empty bottle of spiced liquor. He curses himself for becoming so lazy, planning already to take his blades with him wherever he goes, and damn the peaceful nature of the village he’s made into a home.

Taemin holds his breath, biting his lips on their soft innards to keep himself from breathing too loud and alerting the intruder to his presence. He slips into the door, presses himself against the wall just beside.

“Hello, Viper,” says a voice from Taemin’s dreams, all his hiding gone to waste in one blessèd golden moment.

He startles so badly that he falls back off his heels and onto his ass, legs splayed and dinner spread before him in disarray. His skull cracks against the wall of his home. “What in the name of all the gods,” he mutters, rubbing at his head, the shock of injury knocking from him any thoughts of invasion and danger.

When he lifts his eyes, blurry with the blunt force of hitting a wall head-on, he meets the heavy gaze of a god incarnate. His breath, barely caught, sticks in his throat.

“Jongin,” he says when at last he can exhale. 

The Prince -- King, he corrects himself a second time -- his King sits cross-legged in the dirt floor, watching Taemin’s every minuscule move. His face is bloated with red pustules, some of which have turned a sickly shade of green. His eyes are ringed with a grey so deep it could be mistaken for black in the dying daylight. His hands are shaking, his travelling garb is caked with dirt, and he’s weary with what must be days’ worth of running. He reaches out to Taemin anyway, the lines of his face disappearing with the first contact they make.

“You’re sick,” Taemin says, like it needs to be stated to be obvious. He feels like an idiot for it but he can’t help himself.

“You’re hiding,” Jongin points out, like it’s a good counter. Strange. His voice is still as strong and confident it had been those years before. 

“You’re here.”

And Taemin, in spite of himself, in spite of the disbelief trying to build a wall between his heart and his eyes, crawls forward among the scattered items from the market, and climbs into Jongin’s waiting arms.

“You don’t just get to _be here_ ,” says Taemin, straddling Jongin’s lap and taking his filthy traveling shirt between trembling fists. His vision blurs with salt tears that catch in the bow of his upper lip; he drags his tongue over the bow there, tasting them, tasting the built-up years of futility and frustration that has led to them. “You don’t get to _show up_ , Your Majesty, you’re not supposed to _know_ where to find me, let alone come. And-- and you’re sick, you’re going to get _me_ sick--” He reaches up with a hand, knuckles aching with how hard he’d gripped at Jongin’s clothes. His fingertips meet the swollen curve of Jongin’s cheek.

A boil falls away between them, and Taemin yelps at how disgusting it feels, all liquid as it crushes between their chests. Beneath that spot is perfect, unblemished skin, kissed by the sun and dotted with the same gold tattoos a certain idol had sported in a chapel far, far away.

Jongin smiles, like he’s been hiding a secret for years and is relieved to tell it at last. “I knew,” he says, in a tongue clumsy with disuse. Ten’s promise of his silence and solitude must have been true. Taemin’s heart shrinks in his chest at the idea that his god could have kept a vow no one asked him to make for as long as they’ve been apart. “I knew I didn’t have much chance at seeing you again after helping you escape. But that wasn’t no chance.” He takes Taemin’s jaw in tender hands, thumbs dragging over the soft spots beneath Taemin’s ears, each one in turn. “It was something. So I waited until the time was right. I had people keep tabs on you. They said--” and here, his voice cracks, something childlike and innocent about it. “They said you skipped out on your home village in the night.”

“I did.” Fear does strange things to desperate men, he knows that too well, and he is the strangest of them all. He had not regretted hiding at the time, but now it is all he can think about -- that he could have stayed, that this reunion could have come sooner. “I was afraid I would die. I did not want to die without seeing you one last time, my love, my darling, you can’t just _be here_ \--”

And here, caged between Jongin’s hands, heart aloft with the mere sight of him, Taemin wells over and begins to cry. He buries his wetted face in the crook of Jongin’s neck, breathing in the scent of anointment and travel and far too long of pain. He fits his arms around Jongin’s middle, drawing them closer, til their hearts beat against one another. 

He holds on for all he’s worth.

“We have to go,” says Jongin, so softly that Taemin thinks he imagines it. “We can’t stay, they’ll find us.” He swallows audibly. “I brought money. We can take a ship across the sea.”

It’s too much, too fast. Taemin does not want to move from this spot, to break the marvel of finally seeing his Prince again after longing for what feels like a lifetime. “Stay,” he pleads, a broken sound. “Stay with me. We can leave when the storm passes, just-- for tonight, let’s stay, I’ll make dinner before it rains--”

And Jongin just laughs, and drags his palm down the column of Taemin’s spine. A calm passes through Taemin, the truest peace he has known since they parted with an arrow in a headsman’s chest.

“I’ll stay,” he promises. When Taemin raises his head, he’s met with Jongin’s face, so close to him that when he speaks his vow again, it’s against Taemin’s lips. “I’ll stay with you tonight. Tomorrow, we have to go.”

It’s a promise Taemin can take, he decides. He takes Jongin’s faux-blistered face in his hands and kisses him until the breath leaves him, until his head threatens to roll off his body in its infinite lightness, until all he can taste is sunshine and love, delightful and immaculate on the tip of his tongue.

He draws back, just to search the honeyed depths of Jongin’s eyes, to commit them to memory again. “Tomorrow,” he agrees, and kisses Jongin again.

///

The sun sets, and rises, and sets, and rises again.

It is fascinating, when he looks upon it, that Taemin should have ever observed a sunrise without the hand of this man in his own, without his shoulder balanced carefully on the curve of Jongin’s shoulder.

They make love, tender and careful, under Taemin’s ramshackle roof. Jongin giggles embarrassedly at his lack of preparation, his pockets disappointingly empty when Taemin rifles through them with the same practised ease he had when last they were together. “Fugitives don’t often plan for things like this,” he points out through laughter that he muffles by wrapping his lips around Taemin’s nipple. His fingertips rake soft, pink lines along the length of Taemin’s chest, his stomach, his hips and thighs. They make do, kiss anywhere except the mouth, relearn one another’s bodies.

Jongin has new scars. Taemin honours each and every one of them with a kiss.

He loses count of the sunrises, the sunsets.

Eventually, though, they depart, Taemin’s house left behind. He gives it one last glance, a thank you, as they trek down the beach, trying to find the nearest dock. “It isn’t far,” Jongin promises. Taemin has long since learned to take his promises with a grain of salt, if only because there are things out of his control. “Really. I learned the map before I ever left home.”

“Home,” says Taemin, as careful as he is teasing as he wraps an arm around Jongin’s narrow waist, “is where you and I make it, and nowhere else.”

Jongin dips his head, kisses Taemin’s crown in agreement.

They do find the docks at nightfall, when most everyone running legitimate seafaring operations has already gone to sleep for the night or pushed out into the waves, set on some destination where the sun glows golden and gods are not thought of. Taemin finds the lone man standing at the docks, waiting to signal smugglers that it’s safe to come close to shore. He pushes far too many of Jongin’s stolen coins, and a skin of wine aged to perfection and never touched, and knives he doesn’t need anymore, into the hands of that man, who agrees to take them on the next expedition, states that they’re going across the ocean in the hopes that they can bring supplies to their poor fishing village.

Jongin gives Taemin a look of question, when Taemin gives away his blades. In answer Taemin kisses the spot where Jongin’s pulse rabbits in his neck. After all, he’s safe, now Jongin is with him, now he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder on the slim chance that someone is ready to plunge him through with a knife for every wicked deed he’s done.

They’re stowed below decks, and the sun rises, and sets, and rises again before they’re allowed to see her again. When at last they reach the surface, far enough out to sea that no one can question the captain of this ship, they stare out into the infinite stretch of water before them, glistening brightly under the orange glow of mid-afternoon.

Taemin rests his temple upon Jongin’s shoulder. Their hands meet on the handrail, their fingers intertwining. The ship rocks calmly beneath them, carrying them somewhere that no one will question them, that they can live freely, that Taemin can help people and Jongin can rest easy.

It’s a good plan, thinks Taemin. Better still that he hadn’t thought of it, and hadn’t had the chance to complicate it.

“I love you,” says Taemin softly, the weight of the world no longer resting upon his shoulders. He squeezes Jongin’s hand in his, and watches the horizon, and suppresses a startle when Jongin dusts his lips to the crown of his head. With his free hand he reaches into his coat, pulls out a circlet adorned with a single jewel, and places it carefully on Taemin’s head.

“I love you, Raven King,” Jongin whispers back, admiration clear in his stare.

Taemin laughs in spite of himself, flings his arms around Jongin’s neck, and kisses him enough to last a lifetime to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello again i am so glad you're here, if you're reading this  
> i want to thank again my beautiful and wonderful wife elle who was so patient through the process of editing with this, even when i wanted to crawl out of my own skin at the thought of having to tear some parts apart and add new ones in their place  
> i want to thank kayla for supporting me with art and also with motivation, which has been a real struggle for me— there have been times when i didn't think it mattered whether or not i ever finished it, and she reminded me that it did and loved me all the while and there will never be a gratitude big enough to encompass what i feel about that  
> finally i want to thank you for reading, if you are reading, if you have read, if you've left me curiouscats or comments or anything like that. thank you. thank you so much. i love you, and you kept me going, and still do.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](http://twitter.com/appiarian)   
>  [curiouscat](http://curiouscat.me/chahakyeon)


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